Iran's secular shift: new survey reveals huge changes in religious beliefs
Pooyan Tamimi Arab, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Utrecht University and Ammar Maleki, Assistant Professor, Public Law and Governance, Tilburg University
The Conversation September 10, 2020, 6:14 AM CDT
Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution was a defining event that changed how we think about the relationship between religion and modernity. Ayatollah Khomeini’s mass mobilisation of Islam showed that modernisation by no means implies a linear process of religious decline.
Reliable large-scale data on Iranians’ post-revolutionary religious beliefs, however, has always been lacking. Over the years, research and waves of protests and crackdowns indicated massive disappointment among Iranians with their political system. This steadily turned into a deeply felt disillusionment with institutional religion.
In June 2020, our research institute, the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in IRAN (GAMAAN), conducted an online survey with the collaboration of Ladan Boroumand, co-founder of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran.
The results verify Iranian society’s unprecedented secularisation.
Reaching Iranians online
Iran’s census claims that 99.5% of the population are Muslim, a figure that hides the state’s active hostility toward irreligiosity, conversion and unrecognised religious minorities.
Iranians live with an ever-present fear of retribution for speaking against the state. In Iran, one cannot simply call people or knock on doors seeking answers to politically sensitive questions. That’s why the anonymity of digital surveys offers an opportunity to capture what Iranians really think about religion.
Since the revolution, literacy rates have risen sharply and the urban population has grown substantially. Levels of internet penetration in Iran are comparable to those in Italy, with around 60 million users and the number grows relentlessly: 70% of adults are members of at least one social media platform.
For our survey on religious belief in Iran, we targeted diverse digital channels after analysing which groups showed lower participation rates in our previous large-scale surveys. The link to the survey was shared by Kurdish, Arab, Sufi and other networks. And our research assistant successfully convinced Shia pro-regime channels to spread it among their followers, too. We reached mass audiences by sharing the survey on Instagram pages and Telegram channels, some of which had a few million followers.
After cleaning our data, we were left with a sample of almost 40,000 Iranians living in Iran. The sample was weighted and balanced to the target population of literate Iranians aged above 19, using five demographic variables and voting behaviour in the 2017 presidential elections.
A secular and diverse Iran
Our results reveal dramatic changes in Iranian religiosity, with an increase in secularisation and a diversity of faiths and beliefs. Compared with Iran’s 99.5% census figure, we found that only 40% identified as Muslim.
In contrast with state propaganda that portrays Iran as a Shia nation, only 32% explicitly identified as such, while 5% said they were Sunni Muslim and 3% Sufi Muslim. Another 9% said they were atheists, along with 7% who prefer the label of spirituality. Among the other selected religions, 8% said they were Zoroastrians – which we interpret as a reflection of Persian nationalism and a desire for an alternative to Islam, rather than strict adherence to the Zoroastrian faith – while 1.5% said they were Christian.
Most Iranians, 78%, believe in God, but only 37% believe in life after death and only 30% believe in heaven and hell. In line with other anthropological research, a quarter of our respondents said they believed in jinns or genies. Around 20% said they did not believe in any of the options, including God.
These numbers demonstrate that a general process of secularisation, known to encourage religious diversity, is taking place in Iran. An overwhelming majority, 90%, described themselves as hailing from believing or practising religious families. Yet 47% reported losing their religion in their lifetime, and 6% said they changed from one religious orientation to another. Younger people reported higher levels of irreligiosity and conversion to Christianity than older respondents.
A third said they occasionally drank alcohol in a country that legally enforces temperance. Over 60% said they did not perform the obligatory Muslim daily prayers, synchronous with a 2020 state-backed poll in which 60% reported not observing the fast during Ramadan (the majority due to being “sick”). In comparison, in a comprehensive survey conducted in 1975 before the Islamic Revolution, over 80% said they always prayed and observed the fast.
Religion and legislation
We found that societal secularisation was also linked to a critical view of the religious governance system: 68% agreed that religious prescriptions should be excluded from legislation, even if believers hold a parliamentary majority, and 72% opposed the law mandating all women wear the hijab, the Islamic veil.
Iranians also harbour illiberal secularist opinions regarding religious diversity: 43% said that no religions should have the right to proselytise in public. However, 41% believed that every religion should be able to manifest in public.
Four decades ago, the Islamic Revolution taught sociologists that European-style secularisation is not followed universally around the world. The subsequent secularisation of Iran confirmed by our survey demonstrates that Europe is not exceptional either, but rather part of complex, global interactions between religious and secular forces.
Other research on population growth, whose decline has been linked to higher levels of secularisation, also suggests a decline in religiosity in Iran. In 2020, Iran recorded its lowest population growth, below 1%.
Greater access to the world via the internet, but also through interactions with the global Iranian diaspora in the past 50 years, has generated new communities and forms of religious experience inside the country. A future disentangling of state power and religious authority would likely exacerbate these societal transformations. Iran as we think we know it is changing, in fundamental ways.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Pooyan Tamimi Arab is the secretary of the non-profit research institute GAMAAN.
Ammar Maleki is the director of the non-profit research institute GAMAAN. GAMAAN (gamaan.org) collaborated with and received funding for this research from Ladan Boroumand.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ir ... 17092.html
Perception of Islam
Nobel laureate’s discovery revealed the patterns behind breathtaking works of Islamic art
Sheema Khan is the author of Of Hockey and Hijab: Reflections of a Canadian Muslim Woman.
This year’s Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Roger Penrose, Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel for their research on black holes. Dr. Penrose, a mathematician, proved the existence of black holes from Einstein’s theory of relativity; Dr. Ghez and Dr. Genzel spent decades gathering evidence of a black hole in our own galaxy.
Dr. Penrose also discovered “non-periodic tiling” in 1974, known as Penrose tiling. Think of your kitchen floor: It is completely covered by a repeating pattern of tiles. One simple arrangement is a set of identical square tiles, placed side by side. You can do the same with a set of triangles or a set of hexagons. However, if you try it with a set of identical pentagons, a problem arises. The pentagons will not fit snugly next to each other – in contrast to squares, triangles or hexagons. Dr. Penrose was able to formulate a tiling formation, in which a number of basic tile shapes are used to fully cover a flat surface, such that the resulting tiling pattern does not actually repeat. However, if you were to take a floor covered with Penrose tiling, you could rotate it in multiples of 72 degrees, clockwise or counterclockwise, and obtain the same pattern – an example of five-fold symmetry. The foyer of Texas A&M University’s Mitchell Institute is covered with Penrose tiling.
The tiling stood as a unique mathematical breakthrough – until 2005, when Harvard graduate student Peter Lu discovered variations of the same non-periodic tiling patterns on a 17th-century madrassah in Uzbekistan. With his keen mathematical eye, Dr. Lu was able to distinguish between this unique non-periodic tiling, and the equally breathtaking periodic tiling patterns found in Islamic architecture and artwork throughout history. In the latter, simple circles and squares were transformed into stars and overlapping lattices to form intricate symmetric patterns. The 13th century Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain, provides many beautiful examples of these geometric lattices.
Open this photo in gallery
Harvard University Peter Lu, left, and his cousin Christina Tam in Bukhara, Uzbekistan on Feb. 21, 2007.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY VIA AP
Upon further investigation, Dr. Lu and Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University discovered further examples of non-periodic tiling dating from the 10th to the 15th century, in varied locations such as Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, India and Uzbekistan. They were astounded to find a near-perfect example of Penrose tiling on the façade of the 15th century Darb-I Imam shrine in Iran, created five centuries before Dr. Penrose’s discovery. They also found that a set of five basic tile shapes, called “girih” tiles, were used by craftsmen to create these exquisite patterns. While it is not known exactly how artisans created these patterns on site, the 15th-century Topkapi scroll (housed in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul) provides a template of 114 different patterns of girih tiles. The patterns crafted by the artisans are not the actual tiles, but outlines thereof, thus giving the impression of an intricate latticework (or “girih,” which means “knot”). These Islamic non-periodic tiling patterns also have five-fold symmetry.
What is unknown is how these Muslim artisans and mathematicians discovered girih tiles and their alignment. These unique patterns are also found in naturally occurring quasicrystals, a form of matter with atom patterns that don’t repeat, like normal crystals.
What is known is that the “Golden Age” of Islam flourished from about the 8th century to the 14th, during which time Muslim scientists made advancements in the fields of algebra, geometry, calculus, chemistry, biology, medicine and astronomy. It began with the Abbasid caliphate, which built Baghdad from scratch as its capital, located strategically along many trade routes. The caliphs put a premium on the pursuit of knowledge. They established the House of Wisdom in Baghdad where scholars of different faiths collaborated. They also undertook a massive effort to translate Greek scholarship into Arabic, which was disseminated widely. Scholars built on this information to forge new advances. The Istanbul Museum of the History of Science and Technology in Islam provides a comprehensive look of that era.
What stands out is an era where faith, science and reason worked in harmony. Unlike the Western approach, where science and faith are deemed irreconcilable, the history of Islam is replete with the opposite.
The first verses revealed in the Koran included the command “Read,” reflections of our humble origins (“created from a clot”) and a reminder that God teaches individuals “what they knew not.” Islam’s holy book contains exhortations to study the natural world as a means to know God and a means of worship. Scientists of other faiths, such as Isaac Newton, Gregor Mendel and Thomas Bayes, have charted a similar path.
Whether it is the intricate pattern on a leaf, the sonar system of bats, or the fabric of the universe – all reflect the signs of a Creator within the Islamic paradigm. The key is that knowledge should lead to humility.
Which brings us back to the girih tiles. However they were discovered, it is no surprise that art and mathematics combined to adorn Islamic houses of worship, given that in Islam, the pursuit of knowledge is in harmony with spirituality.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... VgMaFxFnIY
Sheema Khan is the author of Of Hockey and Hijab: Reflections of a Canadian Muslim Woman.
This year’s Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Roger Penrose, Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel for their research on black holes. Dr. Penrose, a mathematician, proved the existence of black holes from Einstein’s theory of relativity; Dr. Ghez and Dr. Genzel spent decades gathering evidence of a black hole in our own galaxy.
Dr. Penrose also discovered “non-periodic tiling” in 1974, known as Penrose tiling. Think of your kitchen floor: It is completely covered by a repeating pattern of tiles. One simple arrangement is a set of identical square tiles, placed side by side. You can do the same with a set of triangles or a set of hexagons. However, if you try it with a set of identical pentagons, a problem arises. The pentagons will not fit snugly next to each other – in contrast to squares, triangles or hexagons. Dr. Penrose was able to formulate a tiling formation, in which a number of basic tile shapes are used to fully cover a flat surface, such that the resulting tiling pattern does not actually repeat. However, if you were to take a floor covered with Penrose tiling, you could rotate it in multiples of 72 degrees, clockwise or counterclockwise, and obtain the same pattern – an example of five-fold symmetry. The foyer of Texas A&M University’s Mitchell Institute is covered with Penrose tiling.
The tiling stood as a unique mathematical breakthrough – until 2005, when Harvard graduate student Peter Lu discovered variations of the same non-periodic tiling patterns on a 17th-century madrassah in Uzbekistan. With his keen mathematical eye, Dr. Lu was able to distinguish between this unique non-periodic tiling, and the equally breathtaking periodic tiling patterns found in Islamic architecture and artwork throughout history. In the latter, simple circles and squares were transformed into stars and overlapping lattices to form intricate symmetric patterns. The 13th century Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain, provides many beautiful examples of these geometric lattices.
Open this photo in gallery
Harvard University Peter Lu, left, and his cousin Christina Tam in Bukhara, Uzbekistan on Feb. 21, 2007.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY VIA AP
Upon further investigation, Dr. Lu and Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University discovered further examples of non-periodic tiling dating from the 10th to the 15th century, in varied locations such as Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, India and Uzbekistan. They were astounded to find a near-perfect example of Penrose tiling on the façade of the 15th century Darb-I Imam shrine in Iran, created five centuries before Dr. Penrose’s discovery. They also found that a set of five basic tile shapes, called “girih” tiles, were used by craftsmen to create these exquisite patterns. While it is not known exactly how artisans created these patterns on site, the 15th-century Topkapi scroll (housed in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul) provides a template of 114 different patterns of girih tiles. The patterns crafted by the artisans are not the actual tiles, but outlines thereof, thus giving the impression of an intricate latticework (or “girih,” which means “knot”). These Islamic non-periodic tiling patterns also have five-fold symmetry.
What is unknown is how these Muslim artisans and mathematicians discovered girih tiles and their alignment. These unique patterns are also found in naturally occurring quasicrystals, a form of matter with atom patterns that don’t repeat, like normal crystals.
What is known is that the “Golden Age” of Islam flourished from about the 8th century to the 14th, during which time Muslim scientists made advancements in the fields of algebra, geometry, calculus, chemistry, biology, medicine and astronomy. It began with the Abbasid caliphate, which built Baghdad from scratch as its capital, located strategically along many trade routes. The caliphs put a premium on the pursuit of knowledge. They established the House of Wisdom in Baghdad where scholars of different faiths collaborated. They also undertook a massive effort to translate Greek scholarship into Arabic, which was disseminated widely. Scholars built on this information to forge new advances. The Istanbul Museum of the History of Science and Technology in Islam provides a comprehensive look of that era.
What stands out is an era where faith, science and reason worked in harmony. Unlike the Western approach, where science and faith are deemed irreconcilable, the history of Islam is replete with the opposite.
The first verses revealed in the Koran included the command “Read,” reflections of our humble origins (“created from a clot”) and a reminder that God teaches individuals “what they knew not.” Islam’s holy book contains exhortations to study the natural world as a means to know God and a means of worship. Scientists of other faiths, such as Isaac Newton, Gregor Mendel and Thomas Bayes, have charted a similar path.
Whether it is the intricate pattern on a leaf, the sonar system of bats, or the fabric of the universe – all reflect the signs of a Creator within the Islamic paradigm. The key is that knowledge should lead to humility.
Which brings us back to the girih tiles. However they were discovered, it is no surprise that art and mathematics combined to adorn Islamic houses of worship, given that in Islam, the pursuit of knowledge is in harmony with spirituality.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... VgMaFxFnIY
Contributions of Muslims to Scientific Progress at Present
The Husband-and-Wife Team Behind the Leading Vaccine to Solve Covid-19
Two years ago, Dr. Ugur Sahin took the stage at a conference in Berlin and made a bold prediction. Speaking to a roomful of infectious disease experts, he said his company might be able to use its so-called messenger RNA technology to rapidly develop a vaccine in the event of a global pandemic.
At the time, Dr. Sahin and his company, BioNTech, were little known outside the small world of European biotechnology start-ups. BioNTech, which Dr. Sahin founded with his wife, Dr. Özlem Türeci, was mostly focused on cancer treatments. It had never brought a product to market. Covid-19 did not yet exist.
But his words proved prophetic.
On Monday, BioNTech and Pfizer announced that a vaccine for the coronavirus developed by Dr. Sahin and his team was more than 90 percent effective in preventing the disease among trial volunteers who had no evidence of having previously been infected. The stunning results vaulted BioNTech and Pfizer to the front of the race to find a cure for a disease that has killed more than 1.2 million people worldwide.
“It could be the beginning of the end of the Covid era,” Dr. Sahin said in an interview on Tuesday.
BioNTech began work on the vaccine in January, after Dr. Sahin read an article in the medical journal The Lancet that left him convinced that the coronavirus, at the time spreading quickly in parts of China, would explode into a full-blown pandemic. Scientists at the company, based in Mainz, Germany, canceled vacations and set to work on what they called Project Lightspeed.
“There are not too many companies on the planet which have the capacity and the competence to do it so fast as we can do it,” Dr. Sahin said in an interview last month. “So it felt not like an opportunity, but a duty to do it, because I realized we could be among the first coming up with a vaccine.”
After BioNTech had identified several promising vaccine candidates, Dr. Sahin concluded that the company would need help to rapidly test them, win approval from regulators and bring the best candidate to market. BioNTech and Pfizer had been working together on a flu vaccine since 2018, and in March, they agreed to collaborate on a coronavirus vaccine.
Since then, Dr. Sahin, who is Turkish, has developed a friendship with Albert Bourla, the Greek chief executive of Pfizer. The pair said in recent interviews that they had bonded over their shared backgrounds as scientists and immigrants.
“We realized that he is from Greece, and that I’m from Turkey,” Dr. Sahin said, without mentioning their native countries’ long-running antagonism. “It was very personal from the very beginning.”
Dr. Sahin, 55, was born in Iskenderun, Turkey. When he was 4, his family moved to Cologne, Germany, where his parents worked at a Ford factory. He grew up wanting to be a doctor, and became a physician at the University of Cologne. In 1993, he earned a doctorate from the university for his work on immunotherapy in tumor cells.
Early in his career, he met Dr. Türeci. She had early hopes to become a nun and ultimately wound up studying medicine. Dr. Türeci, now 53 and the chief medical officer of BioNTech, was born in Germany, the daughter of a Turkish physician who immigrated from Istanbul. On the day they were married, Dr. Sahin and Dr. Türeci returned to the lab after the ceremony.
The pair were initially focused on research and teaching, including at the University of Zurich, where Dr. Sahin worked in the lab of Rolf Zinkernagel, who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in medicine.
In 2001, Dr. Sahin and Dr. Türeci founded Ganymed Pharmaceuticals, which developed drugs to treat cancer using monoclonal antibodies.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/busi ... ccine.html
The Husband-and-Wife Team Behind the Leading Vaccine to Solve Covid-19
Two years ago, Dr. Ugur Sahin took the stage at a conference in Berlin and made a bold prediction. Speaking to a roomful of infectious disease experts, he said his company might be able to use its so-called messenger RNA technology to rapidly develop a vaccine in the event of a global pandemic.
At the time, Dr. Sahin and his company, BioNTech, were little known outside the small world of European biotechnology start-ups. BioNTech, which Dr. Sahin founded with his wife, Dr. Özlem Türeci, was mostly focused on cancer treatments. It had never brought a product to market. Covid-19 did not yet exist.
But his words proved prophetic.
On Monday, BioNTech and Pfizer announced that a vaccine for the coronavirus developed by Dr. Sahin and his team was more than 90 percent effective in preventing the disease among trial volunteers who had no evidence of having previously been infected. The stunning results vaulted BioNTech and Pfizer to the front of the race to find a cure for a disease that has killed more than 1.2 million people worldwide.
“It could be the beginning of the end of the Covid era,” Dr. Sahin said in an interview on Tuesday.
BioNTech began work on the vaccine in January, after Dr. Sahin read an article in the medical journal The Lancet that left him convinced that the coronavirus, at the time spreading quickly in parts of China, would explode into a full-blown pandemic. Scientists at the company, based in Mainz, Germany, canceled vacations and set to work on what they called Project Lightspeed.
“There are not too many companies on the planet which have the capacity and the competence to do it so fast as we can do it,” Dr. Sahin said in an interview last month. “So it felt not like an opportunity, but a duty to do it, because I realized we could be among the first coming up with a vaccine.”
After BioNTech had identified several promising vaccine candidates, Dr. Sahin concluded that the company would need help to rapidly test them, win approval from regulators and bring the best candidate to market. BioNTech and Pfizer had been working together on a flu vaccine since 2018, and in March, they agreed to collaborate on a coronavirus vaccine.
Since then, Dr. Sahin, who is Turkish, has developed a friendship with Albert Bourla, the Greek chief executive of Pfizer. The pair said in recent interviews that they had bonded over their shared backgrounds as scientists and immigrants.
“We realized that he is from Greece, and that I’m from Turkey,” Dr. Sahin said, without mentioning their native countries’ long-running antagonism. “It was very personal from the very beginning.”
Dr. Sahin, 55, was born in Iskenderun, Turkey. When he was 4, his family moved to Cologne, Germany, where his parents worked at a Ford factory. He grew up wanting to be a doctor, and became a physician at the University of Cologne. In 1993, he earned a doctorate from the university for his work on immunotherapy in tumor cells.
Early in his career, he met Dr. Türeci. She had early hopes to become a nun and ultimately wound up studying medicine. Dr. Türeci, now 53 and the chief medical officer of BioNTech, was born in Germany, the daughter of a Turkish physician who immigrated from Istanbul. On the day they were married, Dr. Sahin and Dr. Türeci returned to the lab after the ceremony.
The pair were initially focused on research and teaching, including at the University of Zurich, where Dr. Sahin worked in the lab of Rolf Zinkernagel, who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in medicine.
In 2001, Dr. Sahin and Dr. Türeci founded Ganymed Pharmaceuticals, which developed drugs to treat cancer using monoclonal antibodies.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/busi ... ccine.html
TODAY'S PAPER | NOVEMBER 22, 2020
Shockwaves out of UAE
Pervez Hoodbhoy Updated 21 Nov 2020
UNMARRIED men and women may live together, alcohol restrictions are gone, and honor killings will be judged a crime just as any other. This official decree took effect last week in the United Arab Emirates, a country whose social-political matters are declaredly driven by Sharia law. These new rules apply equally to expatriates (88 per cent) and UAE citizens (12pc), the latter being mostly Sunni Muslims.
Morality has apparently been ripped to shreds. In a frankly patriarchal desert culture where local women wear the niqab, what was unthinkable has happened. Still, no internal protest has been reported and neighboring countries don’t care. Other GCC countries — and even normally hostile Turkey — have not commented. Saudi Arabia, once a bastion of Sunni conservatism, is following a similar path. Theocratic Iran semi-officially admits its alcohol problem and seems resigned. Billboards in Tehran warn against drinking and driving.
No Arab Spring movement is driving this cultural liberalization nor is popular democracy on the cards. Unless something happens, dynastic rulers and clerics will continue to rule. Various new top-down changes simply aim at making Arab countries more Western tourist and business friendly. The recent opening up to Israel undoubtedly plays some part.
Pakistan seeks to lead the Muslim world but civil society in the Middle East is evolving much faster.
But the new legislative changes freeing cultural behavior are likely to impact society far more than political changes. They bring with them many key questions: what is sinful and improper and what does Islam forbid or permit? Which values are truly permanent and absolute and which must inevitably change with time?
Notions of right and wrong are being turned upside down everywhere. There is, for example, complete acceptance now of television across the Muslim world. Even in Pakistan — among the most conservative Islamic countries — families spend evenings glued to the drawing room TV set. Men with beards and women from Al Huda casually snap selfies and WhatsApp them around. Yet older citizens cannot forget admonitions that Islam prohibits photography and the strident denunciations of TV as a ‘shaitani ala’ (devil’s tool).
Aniconism, or a prohibition of depicting images of all living beings, was considered immutable and absolute by almost all early Islamic religious authorities. Scholars and clerics took as axiomatic that the creation and depiction of living forms is God’s prerogative, not to be trespassed upon by artists and painters. So, although Muslims can rightfully boast of magnificent Islamic architecture such as Taj Mahal and Dome of the Rock, Islamic art was narrowly restricted to decorative figural designs.
Aniconism was taken so seriously that — although he later relented — a thoroughly liberal and scientific-minded man like Sir Syed Ahmad Khan refused to be photographed. The Afghan Taliban founder, Mullah Omar, never relented and so no known photo of him exists. The 2005 earthquake in Pakistan’s northern areas was widely attributed to watching television and, two days later, local clerics organized a mass smashing of TV sets in the town of Kaghan.
The march of technology, however, made clerics realize they were missing a huge opportunity. Thus began the age of religious TV channels. Although limited initially to audio recitations and images of floating clouds and heavens, talking heads followed. Thereafter televised sermons and religious gatherings became popular and today’s clerical screen personalities have millions of devotees. Asked about earlier restrictions, one such megastar replied in a complicated way that Islam prohibits drawings and photos but not videos.
Such adaptive changes are not unique to Islam or Pakistan. Fundamental transformations of thought and action have happened everywhere. Take slavery. From the 15th century onwards, European colonialists stole manpower for developing Europe by depopulating Africa. But slavery began phasing out after the European Enlightenment. The British Empire formally outlawed it in 1833. For the United States to follow suit took a civil war and an additional 32 years.
Banning slavery from Muslim countries took much longer. Since the Quran discourages but does not forbid slavery, for nearly 13 centuries the possession of slaves was not condemned as sinful or illegal by any religious authority.
In 1909, anti-slavery Young Turks, inspired by the Westernized Kemal Ataturk, forced Sultan Abdul Hamid II to free his personal slaves. Ataturk dismissed the last Ottoman caliph in 1924 and so ended slavery. Turkey formally ratified the 1926 League of Nations convention abolishing slavery in 1933. Though Western driven, it was surely a good thing.
Whether good or bad, the changes in the UAE’s laws are also Western driven. How the country’s authorities will explain them to the world and their people remains to be seen. Quite possibly no explanation will be forthcoming since UAE is a sovereign country where ruling dynasties exercise total control. Its people don’t have a voice.
On the other hand, UAE could try to get endorsements for the new dispensation from pliant muftis and shaikh-ul-Islam. This won’t be the first time. Muslim rulers are thoroughly familiar with using friendly clerics for blessing bank interest disguised to avoid its condemnation as riba. UAE has supported various militant Salafist groups overseas and is said to have considerable control over the authorities of Egypt’s Jamia al-Azhar. This wide outreach could be useful for suppressing possible criticism.
UAE’s rulers could also try a more straightforward explanation. The West thrives and prospers in spite of its evolving values — what was immoral yesterday is now simply the new normal. Until the 1960s, cohabitation was fiercely frowned upon in much of Europe and the US. But religious opposition has since softened and, in fact, most religions are following the trend.
UAE’s rulers might try arguing that Islam, suitably interpreted, can do so as well. As with child marriage, widow remarriage and polygamy, cohabitation will doubtless lead to furious disputes. But, like it or not, the arrow of time is unidirectional and irreversible.
Pakistan could learn much from recent cultural developments and liberalization of social values in the rest of the Muslim world — a world which it had once aspired to lead. But now in a state of confusion, and dragged willy-nilly by global forces towards an uncertain future, it prefers to keep its eyes fixed firmly upon the past while praying for old times to return.
The writer is an Islamabad-based physicist and writer.
Published in Dawn, November 21st, 2020
https://www.dawn.com/news/1591558/shockwaves-out-of-uae
Shockwaves out of UAE
Pervez Hoodbhoy Updated 21 Nov 2020
UNMARRIED men and women may live together, alcohol restrictions are gone, and honor killings will be judged a crime just as any other. This official decree took effect last week in the United Arab Emirates, a country whose social-political matters are declaredly driven by Sharia law. These new rules apply equally to expatriates (88 per cent) and UAE citizens (12pc), the latter being mostly Sunni Muslims.
Morality has apparently been ripped to shreds. In a frankly patriarchal desert culture where local women wear the niqab, what was unthinkable has happened. Still, no internal protest has been reported and neighboring countries don’t care. Other GCC countries — and even normally hostile Turkey — have not commented. Saudi Arabia, once a bastion of Sunni conservatism, is following a similar path. Theocratic Iran semi-officially admits its alcohol problem and seems resigned. Billboards in Tehran warn against drinking and driving.
No Arab Spring movement is driving this cultural liberalization nor is popular democracy on the cards. Unless something happens, dynastic rulers and clerics will continue to rule. Various new top-down changes simply aim at making Arab countries more Western tourist and business friendly. The recent opening up to Israel undoubtedly plays some part.
Pakistan seeks to lead the Muslim world but civil society in the Middle East is evolving much faster.
But the new legislative changes freeing cultural behavior are likely to impact society far more than political changes. They bring with them many key questions: what is sinful and improper and what does Islam forbid or permit? Which values are truly permanent and absolute and which must inevitably change with time?
Notions of right and wrong are being turned upside down everywhere. There is, for example, complete acceptance now of television across the Muslim world. Even in Pakistan — among the most conservative Islamic countries — families spend evenings glued to the drawing room TV set. Men with beards and women from Al Huda casually snap selfies and WhatsApp them around. Yet older citizens cannot forget admonitions that Islam prohibits photography and the strident denunciations of TV as a ‘shaitani ala’ (devil’s tool).
Aniconism, or a prohibition of depicting images of all living beings, was considered immutable and absolute by almost all early Islamic religious authorities. Scholars and clerics took as axiomatic that the creation and depiction of living forms is God’s prerogative, not to be trespassed upon by artists and painters. So, although Muslims can rightfully boast of magnificent Islamic architecture such as Taj Mahal and Dome of the Rock, Islamic art was narrowly restricted to decorative figural designs.
Aniconism was taken so seriously that — although he later relented — a thoroughly liberal and scientific-minded man like Sir Syed Ahmad Khan refused to be photographed. The Afghan Taliban founder, Mullah Omar, never relented and so no known photo of him exists. The 2005 earthquake in Pakistan’s northern areas was widely attributed to watching television and, two days later, local clerics organized a mass smashing of TV sets in the town of Kaghan.
The march of technology, however, made clerics realize they were missing a huge opportunity. Thus began the age of religious TV channels. Although limited initially to audio recitations and images of floating clouds and heavens, talking heads followed. Thereafter televised sermons and religious gatherings became popular and today’s clerical screen personalities have millions of devotees. Asked about earlier restrictions, one such megastar replied in a complicated way that Islam prohibits drawings and photos but not videos.
Such adaptive changes are not unique to Islam or Pakistan. Fundamental transformations of thought and action have happened everywhere. Take slavery. From the 15th century onwards, European colonialists stole manpower for developing Europe by depopulating Africa. But slavery began phasing out after the European Enlightenment. The British Empire formally outlawed it in 1833. For the United States to follow suit took a civil war and an additional 32 years.
Banning slavery from Muslim countries took much longer. Since the Quran discourages but does not forbid slavery, for nearly 13 centuries the possession of slaves was not condemned as sinful or illegal by any religious authority.
In 1909, anti-slavery Young Turks, inspired by the Westernized Kemal Ataturk, forced Sultan Abdul Hamid II to free his personal slaves. Ataturk dismissed the last Ottoman caliph in 1924 and so ended slavery. Turkey formally ratified the 1926 League of Nations convention abolishing slavery in 1933. Though Western driven, it was surely a good thing.
Whether good or bad, the changes in the UAE’s laws are also Western driven. How the country’s authorities will explain them to the world and their people remains to be seen. Quite possibly no explanation will be forthcoming since UAE is a sovereign country where ruling dynasties exercise total control. Its people don’t have a voice.
On the other hand, UAE could try to get endorsements for the new dispensation from pliant muftis and shaikh-ul-Islam. This won’t be the first time. Muslim rulers are thoroughly familiar with using friendly clerics for blessing bank interest disguised to avoid its condemnation as riba. UAE has supported various militant Salafist groups overseas and is said to have considerable control over the authorities of Egypt’s Jamia al-Azhar. This wide outreach could be useful for suppressing possible criticism.
UAE’s rulers could also try a more straightforward explanation. The West thrives and prospers in spite of its evolving values — what was immoral yesterday is now simply the new normal. Until the 1960s, cohabitation was fiercely frowned upon in much of Europe and the US. But religious opposition has since softened and, in fact, most religions are following the trend.
UAE’s rulers might try arguing that Islam, suitably interpreted, can do so as well. As with child marriage, widow remarriage and polygamy, cohabitation will doubtless lead to furious disputes. But, like it or not, the arrow of time is unidirectional and irreversible.
Pakistan could learn much from recent cultural developments and liberalization of social values in the rest of the Muslim world — a world which it had once aspired to lead. But now in a state of confusion, and dragged willy-nilly by global forces towards an uncertain future, it prefers to keep its eyes fixed firmly upon the past while praying for old times to return.
The writer is an Islamabad-based physicist and writer.
Published in Dawn, November 21st, 2020
https://www.dawn.com/news/1591558/shockwaves-out-of-uae
How modern mathematics emerged from a lost Islamic library
Centuries ago, a prestigious Islamic library brought Arabic numerals to the world. Though the library long since disappeared, its mathematical revolution changed our world.
The House of Wisdom sounds a bit like make believe: no trace remains of this ancient library, destroyed in the 13th Century, so we cannot be sure exactly where it was located or what it looked like.
But this prestigious academy was in fact a major intellectual powerhouse in Baghdad during the Islamic Golden Age, and the birthplace of mathematical concepts as transformative as the common zero and our modern-day “Arabic” numerals.
Founded as a private collection for caliph Harun Al-Rashid in the late 8th Century then converted to a public academy some 30 years later, the House of Wisdom appears to have pulled scientists from all over the world towards Baghdad, drawn as they were by the city’s vibrant intellectual curiosity and freedom of expression (Muslim, Jewish and Christian scholars were all allowed to study there).
An archive as formidable in size as the present-day British Library in London or the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris, the House of Wisdom eventually became an unrivalled centre for the study of humanities and sciences, including mathematics, astronomy, medicine, chemistry, geography, philosophy, literature and the arts – as well as some more dubious subjects such as alchemy and astrology.
To conjure this great monument thus requires a leap of imagination (think the Citadel in Westeros, or the library at Hogwarts), but one thing is certain: the academy ushered in a cultural Renaissance that would entirely alter the course of mathematics.
The House of Wisdom was destroyed in the Mongol Siege of Baghdad in 1258 (according to legend, so many manuscripts were tossed into the River Tigris that its waters turned black from ink), but the discoveries made there introduced a powerful, abstract mathematical language that would later be adopted by the Islamic empire, Europe, and ultimately, the entire world.
“What should matter to us is not the precise details of where or when the House of Wisdom was created,” says Jim Al-Khalili, a professor of physics at the University of Surrey. “Far more interesting is the history of the scientific ideas themselves, and how they developed as a result of it.”
Tracing the House of Wisdom’s mathematical legacy involves a bit of time travel back to the future, as it were. For hundreds of years until the ebb of the Italian Renaissance, one name was synonymous with mathematics in Europe: Leonardo da Pisa, known posthumously as Fibonacci. Born in Pisa in 1170, the Italian mathematician received his primary instruction in Bugia, a trading enclave located on the Barbary coast of Africa (coastal North Africa). In his early 20s, Fibonacci traveled to the Middle East, captivated by ideas that had come west from India through Persia. When he returned to Italy, Fibonacci published Liber Abbaci, one of the first Western works to describe the Hindu-Arabic numeric system.
More...
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2020 ... rary-maths
Centuries ago, a prestigious Islamic library brought Arabic numerals to the world. Though the library long since disappeared, its mathematical revolution changed our world.
The House of Wisdom sounds a bit like make believe: no trace remains of this ancient library, destroyed in the 13th Century, so we cannot be sure exactly where it was located or what it looked like.
But this prestigious academy was in fact a major intellectual powerhouse in Baghdad during the Islamic Golden Age, and the birthplace of mathematical concepts as transformative as the common zero and our modern-day “Arabic” numerals.
Founded as a private collection for caliph Harun Al-Rashid in the late 8th Century then converted to a public academy some 30 years later, the House of Wisdom appears to have pulled scientists from all over the world towards Baghdad, drawn as they were by the city’s vibrant intellectual curiosity and freedom of expression (Muslim, Jewish and Christian scholars were all allowed to study there).
An archive as formidable in size as the present-day British Library in London or the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris, the House of Wisdom eventually became an unrivalled centre for the study of humanities and sciences, including mathematics, astronomy, medicine, chemistry, geography, philosophy, literature and the arts – as well as some more dubious subjects such as alchemy and astrology.
To conjure this great monument thus requires a leap of imagination (think the Citadel in Westeros, or the library at Hogwarts), but one thing is certain: the academy ushered in a cultural Renaissance that would entirely alter the course of mathematics.
The House of Wisdom was destroyed in the Mongol Siege of Baghdad in 1258 (according to legend, so many manuscripts were tossed into the River Tigris that its waters turned black from ink), but the discoveries made there introduced a powerful, abstract mathematical language that would later be adopted by the Islamic empire, Europe, and ultimately, the entire world.
“What should matter to us is not the precise details of where or when the House of Wisdom was created,” says Jim Al-Khalili, a professor of physics at the University of Surrey. “Far more interesting is the history of the scientific ideas themselves, and how they developed as a result of it.”
Tracing the House of Wisdom’s mathematical legacy involves a bit of time travel back to the future, as it were. For hundreds of years until the ebb of the Italian Renaissance, one name was synonymous with mathematics in Europe: Leonardo da Pisa, known posthumously as Fibonacci. Born in Pisa in 1170, the Italian mathematician received his primary instruction in Bugia, a trading enclave located on the Barbary coast of Africa (coastal North Africa). In his early 20s, Fibonacci traveled to the Middle East, captivated by ideas that had come west from India through Persia. When he returned to Italy, Fibonacci published Liber Abbaci, one of the first Western works to describe the Hindu-Arabic numeric system.
More...
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2020 ... rary-maths
The Muslims Who Inspired Spinoza, Locke and Defoe
A novel written by a 12th-century Arab writer about a boy alone on an island influenced the Daniel Defoe classic ‘Robinson Crusoe.’
In this age of anxiety, anger and contestations between the West and the Islamic world, many epoch-shaping stories of intellectual exchanges between our cultures are often forgotten.
A powerful example comes from literature. Millions of Christian, Jewish and Muslim readers across the world have read that famed tale of the man stranded alone on an island: “Robinson Crusoe” by Daniel Defoe, the 18th-century British pamphleteer, political activist and novelist.
Few know that in 1708, 11 years before Defoe wrote his celebrated novel, Simon Ockley, an Orientalist scholar at Cambridge University, translated and published a 12th-century Arabic novel, “Hayy ibn Yaqzan,” or “Alive, the Son of Awake,” by Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Tufayl, an Andalusian-Arab polymath. Writing about the influence of Ibn Tufayl’s novel on Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe,” Martin Wainwright, a former Guardian editor, remarked, “Tufayl’s footprints mark the great classic.”
Ibn Tufayl’s novel tells the tale of Hayy, a boy growing up alone on a deserted island, with animals. As he grows up, Hayy uses his senses and reason to understand the workings of the natural world. He explores the laws of nature, devises a rational theology and entertains theories about the origin of the universe. He develops a sense of ethics: Out of mercy for animals, he turns vegetarian, and out of care for plants, he preserves their seeds.
Hayy then leaves his island and visits a religious society. He finds that the teachings of reason and religion are compatible and complementary. Yet he notices that some religious people may be crude, even hypocritical. He returns to his island, where he had found God and developed his concepts of truth, morality and ethics by relying on observation and reasoning.
Ibn Tufayl’s message was clear — and for its times, quite bold: Religion was a path to truth, but it was not the only path. Man was blessed with divine revelation, and with reason and conscience from within. People could be wise and virtuous without religion or a different religion.
The translations of “Hayy ibn Yaqzan” in early modern Europe — by Edward Pococke Jr. into Latin in 1671, by George Keith into English in 1674, by Simon Ockley into English in 1708 — sold widely. Among the admirers of Ibn Tufayl’s work were the Enlightenment philosophers Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and John Locke, who were trying to advance a sense of human dignity in a Christendom long tormented by religious wars and sectarian persecutions.
Fans of the novel also included a new Protestant sect: Quakers. Mr. Keith, a leading Quaker minister, who translated the novel into English, helped publicize it in European intellectuals circles. He admired the novel, for it echoed the Quaker doctrine that every human being had an “inward light” — regardless of faith, gender or race. That humanist theology would have profound political consequences, making Quakers, in a few centuries, leaders in world-changing campaigns: abolition of slavery, emancipation of women, and other worthy causes.
The insights in Ibn Tufayl’s work that inspired the Quakers also shined in the works of Abul-Walid Muhammad Ibn Rushd, also known as Averroes. Ibn Tufayl, who served as a minister in the court of an Almohad caliph of Islamic Spain, commissioned Ibn Rushd, to write commentaries on ancient Greek philosophy, which became the main source for the European rediscovery of the Greeks, earning him great reverence in Western intellectual history.
What is less known is that Ibn Rushd also sought to harmonize his philosophical insights with Islamic law — the Shariah. At the core of Ibn Rushd’s effort was the vision of Ibn Tufayl’s philosophical novel: Religion and reason were both independent sources of wisdom. Religion had its written laws, while reason had its unwritten laws, the universal principles of justice, mercy or thankfulness. When there was a conflict between these two, Ibn Rushd argued, written laws of religion should be reinterpreted as they were inevitably bound with context.
Ibn Rushd applied this vision to the debate on jihad, criticizing the militant Muslims of his time who called for jihad “until they uproot and destroy entirely whoever disagrees with them.” He saw that position as reflecting “ignorance on their part of the intention of the legislator,” or God, who could not have reasonably willed “the great harm” of war.
He used the same perspective to critique the enfeebling of women in medieval Muslim society, which was a result of the denial of their intellectual capacity. He did his best to advance the most women-friendly views in Islamic jurisprudence: Women had the right to refuse polygamy, enjoy equal right to divorce, avoid the face veil, or to become judges.
Ibn Rushd’s other key contribution to modern Europe was his call for open debate, where views are freely expressed and rationally measured. “You should always, when presenting a philosophical argument, cite the views of your opponents,” he wrote. “Failure to do so is an implicit acknowledgment of the weakness of your own case.” The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, a towering intellectual we lost last year, had traced how Ibn Rushd’s insight was picked up by the 17th-century Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, John Milton and John Stuart Mill.
Yet conservatives in Islamic Spain abhorred Ibn Rushd’s indulgence in philosophy and accused him of being a polytheist after he cited a Greek philosopher who was a worshiper of Venus. He was publicly humiliated, exiled and forced into house imprisonment. His books on philosophy were burned. They survived in Hebrew or Latin translations in Europe, but most of the Arabic originals were lost.
This loss has had grim consequences for Muslims. Powerful orthodoxies in the Islamic world — although parochialism and bigotry have proliferated in other communities as well — are still denying values distilled from the “unwritten laws” of humanity: human rights, religious liberty, or gender equality. They rather preach blind obedience to old verdicts, without asking “why and how,” and without deploying reason and conscience. The result is a troubling religiosity that relies on coercion instead of freedom, and generates moralism instead of morality.
The way forward for the Islamic world lies in reconciling faith and reason. A good first step would be to reconsider what Ibn Tufayl’s “Hayy ibn Yaqzan” and the works of Ibn Rushd were trying to tell us.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/05/opin ... 778d3e6de3
A novel written by a 12th-century Arab writer about a boy alone on an island influenced the Daniel Defoe classic ‘Robinson Crusoe.’
In this age of anxiety, anger and contestations between the West and the Islamic world, many epoch-shaping stories of intellectual exchanges between our cultures are often forgotten.
A powerful example comes from literature. Millions of Christian, Jewish and Muslim readers across the world have read that famed tale of the man stranded alone on an island: “Robinson Crusoe” by Daniel Defoe, the 18th-century British pamphleteer, political activist and novelist.
Few know that in 1708, 11 years before Defoe wrote his celebrated novel, Simon Ockley, an Orientalist scholar at Cambridge University, translated and published a 12th-century Arabic novel, “Hayy ibn Yaqzan,” or “Alive, the Son of Awake,” by Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Tufayl, an Andalusian-Arab polymath. Writing about the influence of Ibn Tufayl’s novel on Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe,” Martin Wainwright, a former Guardian editor, remarked, “Tufayl’s footprints mark the great classic.”
Ibn Tufayl’s novel tells the tale of Hayy, a boy growing up alone on a deserted island, with animals. As he grows up, Hayy uses his senses and reason to understand the workings of the natural world. He explores the laws of nature, devises a rational theology and entertains theories about the origin of the universe. He develops a sense of ethics: Out of mercy for animals, he turns vegetarian, and out of care for plants, he preserves their seeds.
Hayy then leaves his island and visits a religious society. He finds that the teachings of reason and religion are compatible and complementary. Yet he notices that some religious people may be crude, even hypocritical. He returns to his island, where he had found God and developed his concepts of truth, morality and ethics by relying on observation and reasoning.
Ibn Tufayl’s message was clear — and for its times, quite bold: Religion was a path to truth, but it was not the only path. Man was blessed with divine revelation, and with reason and conscience from within. People could be wise and virtuous without religion or a different religion.
The translations of “Hayy ibn Yaqzan” in early modern Europe — by Edward Pococke Jr. into Latin in 1671, by George Keith into English in 1674, by Simon Ockley into English in 1708 — sold widely. Among the admirers of Ibn Tufayl’s work were the Enlightenment philosophers Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and John Locke, who were trying to advance a sense of human dignity in a Christendom long tormented by religious wars and sectarian persecutions.
Fans of the novel also included a new Protestant sect: Quakers. Mr. Keith, a leading Quaker minister, who translated the novel into English, helped publicize it in European intellectuals circles. He admired the novel, for it echoed the Quaker doctrine that every human being had an “inward light” — regardless of faith, gender or race. That humanist theology would have profound political consequences, making Quakers, in a few centuries, leaders in world-changing campaigns: abolition of slavery, emancipation of women, and other worthy causes.
The insights in Ibn Tufayl’s work that inspired the Quakers also shined in the works of Abul-Walid Muhammad Ibn Rushd, also known as Averroes. Ibn Tufayl, who served as a minister in the court of an Almohad caliph of Islamic Spain, commissioned Ibn Rushd, to write commentaries on ancient Greek philosophy, which became the main source for the European rediscovery of the Greeks, earning him great reverence in Western intellectual history.
What is less known is that Ibn Rushd also sought to harmonize his philosophical insights with Islamic law — the Shariah. At the core of Ibn Rushd’s effort was the vision of Ibn Tufayl’s philosophical novel: Religion and reason were both independent sources of wisdom. Religion had its written laws, while reason had its unwritten laws, the universal principles of justice, mercy or thankfulness. When there was a conflict between these two, Ibn Rushd argued, written laws of religion should be reinterpreted as they were inevitably bound with context.
Ibn Rushd applied this vision to the debate on jihad, criticizing the militant Muslims of his time who called for jihad “until they uproot and destroy entirely whoever disagrees with them.” He saw that position as reflecting “ignorance on their part of the intention of the legislator,” or God, who could not have reasonably willed “the great harm” of war.
He used the same perspective to critique the enfeebling of women in medieval Muslim society, which was a result of the denial of their intellectual capacity. He did his best to advance the most women-friendly views in Islamic jurisprudence: Women had the right to refuse polygamy, enjoy equal right to divorce, avoid the face veil, or to become judges.
Ibn Rushd’s other key contribution to modern Europe was his call for open debate, where views are freely expressed and rationally measured. “You should always, when presenting a philosophical argument, cite the views of your opponents,” he wrote. “Failure to do so is an implicit acknowledgment of the weakness of your own case.” The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, a towering intellectual we lost last year, had traced how Ibn Rushd’s insight was picked up by the 17th-century Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, John Milton and John Stuart Mill.
Yet conservatives in Islamic Spain abhorred Ibn Rushd’s indulgence in philosophy and accused him of being a polytheist after he cited a Greek philosopher who was a worshiper of Venus. He was publicly humiliated, exiled and forced into house imprisonment. His books on philosophy were burned. They survived in Hebrew or Latin translations in Europe, but most of the Arabic originals were lost.
This loss has had grim consequences for Muslims. Powerful orthodoxies in the Islamic world — although parochialism and bigotry have proliferated in other communities as well — are still denying values distilled from the “unwritten laws” of humanity: human rights, religious liberty, or gender equality. They rather preach blind obedience to old verdicts, without asking “why and how,” and without deploying reason and conscience. The result is a troubling religiosity that relies on coercion instead of freedom, and generates moralism instead of morality.
The way forward for the Islamic world lies in reconciling faith and reason. A good first step would be to reconsider what Ibn Tufayl’s “Hayy ibn Yaqzan” and the works of Ibn Rushd were trying to tell us.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/05/opin ... 778d3e6de3
PM Imran Khan's Speech That Surprised The Turkish President | TE2L
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvFQDJplIoo
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvFQDJplIoo
Suleyman Dost, Assistant Professor of Classical Islam, Brandeis University
Sun, May 30, 2021, 9:44 AM
Hilye, or calligraphic panel containing a physical description of the Prophet Muhammad made in 1718 in the Galata Palace, Istanbul. Dihya Salim al-Fahim, (1718), via Wikimedia Commons
The republication of caricatures depicting the Prophet Muhammad by French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in September 2020 led to protests in several Muslim-majority countries. It also resulted in disturbing acts of violence: In the weeks that followed, two people were stabbed near the former headquarters of the magazine and a teacher was beheaded after he showed the cartoons during a classroom lesson.
Visual depiction of Muhammad is a sensitive issue for a number of reasons: Islam’s early stance against idolatry led to a general disapproval for images of living beings throughout Islamic history. Muslims seldom produced or circulated images of Muhammad or other notable early Muslims. The recent caricatures have offended many Muslims around the world.
This focus on the reactions to the images of Muhammad drowns out an important question: How did Muslims imagine him for centuries in the near total absence of icons and images?
Picturing Muhammad without images
In my courses on early Islam and the life of Muhammad, I teach to the amazement of my students that there are few pre-modern historical figures that we know more about than we do about Muhammad.
The respect and devotion that the first generations of Muslims accorded to him led to an abundance of textual materials that provided rich details about every aspect of his life.
The prophet’s earliest surviving biography, written a century after his death, runs into hundreds of pages in English. His final 10 years are so well-documented that some episodes of his life during this period can be tracked day by day.
Even more detailed are books from the early Islamic period dedicated specifically to the description of Muhammad’s body, character and manners. From a very popular ninth-century book on the subject titled “Shama'il al-Muhammadiyya” or The Sublime Qualities of Muhammad, Muslims learned everything from Muhammad’s height and body hair to his sleep habits, clothing preferences and favorite food.
No single piece of information was seen too mundane or irrelevant when it concerned the prophet. The way he walked and sat is recorded in this book alongside the approximate amount of white hair on his temples in old age.
These meticulous textual descriptions have functioned for Muslims throughout centuries as an alternative for visual representations.
Most Muslims pictured Muhammad as described by his cousin and son-in-law Ali in a famous passage contained in the Shama'il al-Muhammadiyya: a broad-shouldered man of medium height, with black, wavy hair and a rosy complexion, walking with a slight downward lean. The second half of the description focused on his character: a humble man that inspired awe and respect in everyone that met him.
That said, figurative portrayals of Muhammad were not entirely unheard of in the Islamic world. In fact, manuscripts from the 13th century onward did contain scenes from the prophet’s life, showing him in full figure initially and with a veiled face later on.
The majority of Muslims, however, would not have access to the manuscripts that contained these images of the prophet. For those who wanted to visualize Muhammad, there were nonpictorial, textual alternatives.
There was an artistic tradition that was particularly popular among Turkish- and Persian-speaking Muslims.
Ornamented and gilded edgings on a single page were filled with a masterfully calligraphed text of Muhammad’s description by Ali in the Shama'il. The center of the page featured a famous verse from the Quran: “We only sent you (Muhammad) as a mercy to the worlds.”
These textual portraits, called “hilya” in Arabic, were the closest that one would get to an “image” of Muhammad in most of the Muslim world. Some hilyas were strictly without any figural representation, while others contained a drawing of the Kaaba, the holy shrine in Mecca, or a rose that symbolized the beauty of the prophet.
Framed hilyas graced mosques and private houses well into the 20th century. Smaller specimens were carried in bottles or the pockets of those who believed in the spiritual power of the prophet’s description for good health and against evil. Hilyas kept the memory of Muhammad fresh for those who wanted to imagine him from mere words.
Different interpretations
The Islamic legal basis for banning images, including Muhammad’s, is less than straightforward and there are variations across denominations and legal schools.
It appears, for instance, that Shiite communities have been more accepting of visual representations for devotional purposes than Sunni ones. Pictures of Muhammad, Ali and other family members of the prophet have some circulation in the popular religious culture of Shiite-majority countries, such as Iran. Sunni Islam, on the other hand, has largely shunned religious iconography.
Outside the Islamic world, Muhammad was regularly fictionalized in literature and was depicted in images in medieval and early modern Christendom. But this was often in less than sympathetic forms. Dante’s “Inferno,” most famously, had the prophet and Ali suffering in hell, and the scene inspired many drawings.
These depictions, however, hardly ever received any attention from the Muslim world, as they were produced for and consumed within the Christian world.
Offensive caricatures and colonial past
Providing historical precedents for the visual depictions of Muhammad adds much-needed nuance to a complex and potentially incendiary issue, but it helps explain only part of the picture.
Equally important for understanding the reactions to the images of Muhammad are developments from more recent history. Europe now has a large Muslim minority, and fictionalized depictions of Muhammad, visual or otherwise, do not go unnoticed.
With advances in mass communication and social media, the spread of the images is swift, and so is the mobilization for reactions to them.
Most importantly, many Muslims find the caricatures offensive for its Islamophobic content. Some of the caricatures draw a coarse equation of Islam with violence or debauchery through Muhammad’s image, a pervasive theme in the colonial European scholarship on Muhammad.
Anthropologist Saba Mahmood has argued that such depictions can cause “moral injury” for Muslims, an emotional pain due to the special relation that they have with the prophet. Political scientist Andrew March sees the caricatures as “a political act” that could cause harm to the efforts of creating a “public space where Muslims feel safe, valued, and equal.”
Even without images, Muslims have cultivated a vivid mental picture of Muhammad, not just of his appearance but of his entire persona. The crudeness of some of the caricatures of Muhammad is worth a moment of thought.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Suleyman Dost, Brandeis University.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/mu ... 0743796.ht
Sun, May 30, 2021, 9:44 AM
Hilye, or calligraphic panel containing a physical description of the Prophet Muhammad made in 1718 in the Galata Palace, Istanbul. Dihya Salim al-Fahim, (1718), via Wikimedia Commons
The republication of caricatures depicting the Prophet Muhammad by French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in September 2020 led to protests in several Muslim-majority countries. It also resulted in disturbing acts of violence: In the weeks that followed, two people were stabbed near the former headquarters of the magazine and a teacher was beheaded after he showed the cartoons during a classroom lesson.
Visual depiction of Muhammad is a sensitive issue for a number of reasons: Islam’s early stance against idolatry led to a general disapproval for images of living beings throughout Islamic history. Muslims seldom produced or circulated images of Muhammad or other notable early Muslims. The recent caricatures have offended many Muslims around the world.
This focus on the reactions to the images of Muhammad drowns out an important question: How did Muslims imagine him for centuries in the near total absence of icons and images?
Picturing Muhammad without images
In my courses on early Islam and the life of Muhammad, I teach to the amazement of my students that there are few pre-modern historical figures that we know more about than we do about Muhammad.
The respect and devotion that the first generations of Muslims accorded to him led to an abundance of textual materials that provided rich details about every aspect of his life.
The prophet’s earliest surviving biography, written a century after his death, runs into hundreds of pages in English. His final 10 years are so well-documented that some episodes of his life during this period can be tracked day by day.
Even more detailed are books from the early Islamic period dedicated specifically to the description of Muhammad’s body, character and manners. From a very popular ninth-century book on the subject titled “Shama'il al-Muhammadiyya” or The Sublime Qualities of Muhammad, Muslims learned everything from Muhammad’s height and body hair to his sleep habits, clothing preferences and favorite food.
No single piece of information was seen too mundane or irrelevant when it concerned the prophet. The way he walked and sat is recorded in this book alongside the approximate amount of white hair on his temples in old age.
These meticulous textual descriptions have functioned for Muslims throughout centuries as an alternative for visual representations.
Most Muslims pictured Muhammad as described by his cousin and son-in-law Ali in a famous passage contained in the Shama'il al-Muhammadiyya: a broad-shouldered man of medium height, with black, wavy hair and a rosy complexion, walking with a slight downward lean. The second half of the description focused on his character: a humble man that inspired awe and respect in everyone that met him.
That said, figurative portrayals of Muhammad were not entirely unheard of in the Islamic world. In fact, manuscripts from the 13th century onward did contain scenes from the prophet’s life, showing him in full figure initially and with a veiled face later on.
The majority of Muslims, however, would not have access to the manuscripts that contained these images of the prophet. For those who wanted to visualize Muhammad, there were nonpictorial, textual alternatives.
There was an artistic tradition that was particularly popular among Turkish- and Persian-speaking Muslims.
Ornamented and gilded edgings on a single page were filled with a masterfully calligraphed text of Muhammad’s description by Ali in the Shama'il. The center of the page featured a famous verse from the Quran: “We only sent you (Muhammad) as a mercy to the worlds.”
These textual portraits, called “hilya” in Arabic, were the closest that one would get to an “image” of Muhammad in most of the Muslim world. Some hilyas were strictly without any figural representation, while others contained a drawing of the Kaaba, the holy shrine in Mecca, or a rose that symbolized the beauty of the prophet.
Framed hilyas graced mosques and private houses well into the 20th century. Smaller specimens were carried in bottles or the pockets of those who believed in the spiritual power of the prophet’s description for good health and against evil. Hilyas kept the memory of Muhammad fresh for those who wanted to imagine him from mere words.
Different interpretations
The Islamic legal basis for banning images, including Muhammad’s, is less than straightforward and there are variations across denominations and legal schools.
It appears, for instance, that Shiite communities have been more accepting of visual representations for devotional purposes than Sunni ones. Pictures of Muhammad, Ali and other family members of the prophet have some circulation in the popular religious culture of Shiite-majority countries, such as Iran. Sunni Islam, on the other hand, has largely shunned religious iconography.
Outside the Islamic world, Muhammad was regularly fictionalized in literature and was depicted in images in medieval and early modern Christendom. But this was often in less than sympathetic forms. Dante’s “Inferno,” most famously, had the prophet and Ali suffering in hell, and the scene inspired many drawings.
These depictions, however, hardly ever received any attention from the Muslim world, as they were produced for and consumed within the Christian world.
Offensive caricatures and colonial past
Providing historical precedents for the visual depictions of Muhammad adds much-needed nuance to a complex and potentially incendiary issue, but it helps explain only part of the picture.
Equally important for understanding the reactions to the images of Muhammad are developments from more recent history. Europe now has a large Muslim minority, and fictionalized depictions of Muhammad, visual or otherwise, do not go unnoticed.
With advances in mass communication and social media, the spread of the images is swift, and so is the mobilization for reactions to them.
Most importantly, many Muslims find the caricatures offensive for its Islamophobic content. Some of the caricatures draw a coarse equation of Islam with violence or debauchery through Muhammad’s image, a pervasive theme in the colonial European scholarship on Muhammad.
Anthropologist Saba Mahmood has argued that such depictions can cause “moral injury” for Muslims, an emotional pain due to the special relation that they have with the prophet. Political scientist Andrew March sees the caricatures as “a political act” that could cause harm to the efforts of creating a “public space where Muslims feel safe, valued, and equal.”
Even without images, Muslims have cultivated a vivid mental picture of Muhammad, not just of his appearance but of his entire persona. The crudeness of some of the caricatures of Muhammad is worth a moment of thought.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Suleyman Dost, Brandeis University.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/mu ... 0743796.ht
The London attack reaffirms why Muslims often feel unsafe in their own country
SHEEMA KHAN
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED JUNE 8, 2021
Every few years, I feel very vulnerable and unsafe. This is one of those times.
On Sunday, five members – three generations – of a Muslim family went out for a walk on a summer’s evening in London, Ont., an opportunity relished by many Canadians during the COVID-19 pandemic. For this family, it was regular activity before returning home to offer the sunset prayer, according to a neighbour.
Yet this simple act of enjoying nature with one’s family is no more because of an act of pure, unadulterated hatred.
While waiting at a stoplight, Madiha Salman, her husband Salman Afzaal, 15-year-old daughter Yumna, nine-year-old son Fayez, and 74-year-old mother-in-law were allegedly rammed by a 20-year-old driver who, according to police and witnesses, deliberately accelerated his pickup toward the family, targeting them because they were Muslim.
Initially, police said the extended family requested to keep the victims’ names private, but the family identified them in a statement Monday. Only Fayez survived. Now an orphan, he is recuperating in hospital.
What kind of world are we living in?
For Muslims, it is unfortunately one where the slow drumbeat of hate-filled violence has become louder. The 2017 Quebec City massacre, in which worshippers were gunned down at a mosque – a place of spiritual refuge – shook all of us to the core.
As a nation, we vowed to fight the scourge of Islamophobia. Muslims wondered if a visit to their local mosque might be their last. Such was, and is, the fear. Enhanced safety features – including screened entries and guards – became the uneasy norm.
Yet this was still not enough back in September, when 58-year-old Mohamed-Aslim Zafis was killed outside an Etobicoke, Ont., mosque by an apparent white supremacist. Mr. Zafis was a volunteer caretaker of the mosque he cherished. On that fateful evening, he sat outside, controlling entry to the mosque in compliance with COVID-19 protocols. The accused perpetrator slipped behind Mr. Zafis, slashed his throat and fled.
Violence is happening all over the country. This year alone, there have been multiple reported assaults in Edmonton, where strangers have threatened Muslim women. In at least five cases, women were pushed, kicked and/or punched in public.
Calgary has similarly witnessed numerous cases of assault against Muslims; three involved women physically attacked in broad daylight because of their hijab. Understandably, the women have been emotionally and physically traumatized.
And now, a family has been killed in London. Is it any wonder why Muslims – especially women – don’t feel safe?
Yet this nation is far greater than the hate-filled zealots who seek to intimidate, sow fear and spread the bigotry that fuels them. The outpouring of grief and support from Canadians has been a balm to the shock felt by Muslims across the land.
Since the news came out about the attack, I have received heartfelt messages of support, including the following from my friend and colleague Myriam Davidson: “It breaks my heart,” she wrote. “The best I have is we are here standing with you. There is no place for Islamophobia in our communities – it is despicable. Whenever a synagogue gets attacked – what brings me comfort is when non-Jews speak up, call it out and reaffirm that we are an inclusive society where this is not tolerated. So I’m modelling the best I know how.”
And that is the key: reaching out the best way each of us can. Our society will be stronger for it. While Muslims will rely on their faith for spiritual succour, we will need emotional support from others to overcome our fears and to know that we are valued members of the Canadian family.
There are many ways to help. Some Muslims are fearful to go for a simple walk, so offer to accompany them. Donate to a fund for nine-year-old Fayez. Attend a vigil. Perhaps the most powerful gesture is to simply say, “I am here for you.”
Last week, I was mesmerized by the haunting, powerful rendition of “O Canada” by Winnipeg folk singer-songwriter Don Amero, accompanied by Elders Wally and Karen Swain, prior to a Habs-Jets playoff game. While Mr. Amero sang, I asked myself: “How does he have the fortitude to sing an anthem of a country whose government, for 150 years, committed cultural genocide against the Indigenous peoples of this land?”
I know I could not. Yet Mr. Amero taught me something that resonates today, which is that the power of love, of resilience, of dignity always conquers bitterness.
We will come together – whether it is to address deep-rooted historical prejudices against Indigenous communities, or contemporary hatred against minority communities. Let us dig deep into the well of human compassion to continuously build a more just, inclusive society.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... their-own/
SHEEMA KHAN
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED JUNE 8, 2021
Every few years, I feel very vulnerable and unsafe. This is one of those times.
On Sunday, five members – three generations – of a Muslim family went out for a walk on a summer’s evening in London, Ont., an opportunity relished by many Canadians during the COVID-19 pandemic. For this family, it was regular activity before returning home to offer the sunset prayer, according to a neighbour.
Yet this simple act of enjoying nature with one’s family is no more because of an act of pure, unadulterated hatred.
While waiting at a stoplight, Madiha Salman, her husband Salman Afzaal, 15-year-old daughter Yumna, nine-year-old son Fayez, and 74-year-old mother-in-law were allegedly rammed by a 20-year-old driver who, according to police and witnesses, deliberately accelerated his pickup toward the family, targeting them because they were Muslim.
Initially, police said the extended family requested to keep the victims’ names private, but the family identified them in a statement Monday. Only Fayez survived. Now an orphan, he is recuperating in hospital.
What kind of world are we living in?
For Muslims, it is unfortunately one where the slow drumbeat of hate-filled violence has become louder. The 2017 Quebec City massacre, in which worshippers were gunned down at a mosque – a place of spiritual refuge – shook all of us to the core.
As a nation, we vowed to fight the scourge of Islamophobia. Muslims wondered if a visit to their local mosque might be their last. Such was, and is, the fear. Enhanced safety features – including screened entries and guards – became the uneasy norm.
Yet this was still not enough back in September, when 58-year-old Mohamed-Aslim Zafis was killed outside an Etobicoke, Ont., mosque by an apparent white supremacist. Mr. Zafis was a volunteer caretaker of the mosque he cherished. On that fateful evening, he sat outside, controlling entry to the mosque in compliance with COVID-19 protocols. The accused perpetrator slipped behind Mr. Zafis, slashed his throat and fled.
Violence is happening all over the country. This year alone, there have been multiple reported assaults in Edmonton, where strangers have threatened Muslim women. In at least five cases, women were pushed, kicked and/or punched in public.
Calgary has similarly witnessed numerous cases of assault against Muslims; three involved women physically attacked in broad daylight because of their hijab. Understandably, the women have been emotionally and physically traumatized.
And now, a family has been killed in London. Is it any wonder why Muslims – especially women – don’t feel safe?
Yet this nation is far greater than the hate-filled zealots who seek to intimidate, sow fear and spread the bigotry that fuels them. The outpouring of grief and support from Canadians has been a balm to the shock felt by Muslims across the land.
Since the news came out about the attack, I have received heartfelt messages of support, including the following from my friend and colleague Myriam Davidson: “It breaks my heart,” she wrote. “The best I have is we are here standing with you. There is no place for Islamophobia in our communities – it is despicable. Whenever a synagogue gets attacked – what brings me comfort is when non-Jews speak up, call it out and reaffirm that we are an inclusive society where this is not tolerated. So I’m modelling the best I know how.”
And that is the key: reaching out the best way each of us can. Our society will be stronger for it. While Muslims will rely on their faith for spiritual succour, we will need emotional support from others to overcome our fears and to know that we are valued members of the Canadian family.
There are many ways to help. Some Muslims are fearful to go for a simple walk, so offer to accompany them. Donate to a fund for nine-year-old Fayez. Attend a vigil. Perhaps the most powerful gesture is to simply say, “I am here for you.”
Last week, I was mesmerized by the haunting, powerful rendition of “O Canada” by Winnipeg folk singer-songwriter Don Amero, accompanied by Elders Wally and Karen Swain, prior to a Habs-Jets playoff game. While Mr. Amero sang, I asked myself: “How does he have the fortitude to sing an anthem of a country whose government, for 150 years, committed cultural genocide against the Indigenous peoples of this land?”
I know I could not. Yet Mr. Amero taught me something that resonates today, which is that the power of love, of resilience, of dignity always conquers bitterness.
We will come together – whether it is to address deep-rooted historical prejudices against Indigenous communities, or contemporary hatred against minority communities. Let us dig deep into the well of human compassion to continuously build a more just, inclusive society.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... their-own/
The Fear of Islam: A Conversation with Todd Green
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2i8M7DmaJ8
Todd Green, author of The Fear of Islam: An Introduction to Islamophobia in the West (Fortress Press 2015), discusses his reasons for writing the book, the basis for the West's fear of Islam, and the most common misconceptions about the study of Islamophobia.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2i8M7DmaJ8
Todd Green, author of The Fear of Islam: An Introduction to Islamophobia in the West (Fortress Press 2015), discusses his reasons for writing the book, the basis for the West's fear of Islam, and the most common misconceptions about the study of Islamophobia.
SAT Aug 7 • 11am PT | 2pm ET • Webinar
Thought Leader Series: Celebrating Muslim Excellence
The Aga Khan Council for Canada, the Ismaili Centres (Vancouver, Toronto) and the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, in collaboration with The Muslim Awards for Excellence and the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto, have launched a new series which aims to:
• Provide a platform for Muslims who are thought leaders in their areas of expertise/professions from across Canada to enhance and showcase their contributions to Canadian society.
• Promote discussion on topics of relevance to Canadian society, with a particular emphasis on emerging issues.
• Bring Muslims of diverse backgrounds together to share knowledge and ideas.
The inaugural program in the series will be launched on Saturday, August 7 at 11am PT | 12pm MT | 2pm ET with the theme of “Muslims in Science and Medicine: Navigating the Currents of COVID-19”.
Register
https://iicanada.org/form/thought-leade ... cellence-0
Daily Diamond
"The great British scientist, Sir Isaac Newton, remarked that if he was able to see further than his predecessors, it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants. Among those giants, who made possible the scientific revolution in Europe, were Ibn Sina, whose ‘Canon of Medicine’ was a standard text for 500 years; Al-Idrisi, the geographer; Ibn Rushd, the philosopher, and a host of other Muslim scientists who had produced the notion of specific gravity, refined Euclid’s theories, perfected solid geometry, evolved trigonometry and algebra, and made modern mathematics possible by developing Indian numerals and the concept of the zero as a numeral of no place , an invention crucial to every aspect of technology from that time onwards to the present day."
Mawlana Hazar Imam, Karachi, Pakistan, March 1983
Thought Leader Series: Celebrating Muslim Excellence
The Aga Khan Council for Canada, the Ismaili Centres (Vancouver, Toronto) and the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, in collaboration with The Muslim Awards for Excellence and the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto, have launched a new series which aims to:
• Provide a platform for Muslims who are thought leaders in their areas of expertise/professions from across Canada to enhance and showcase their contributions to Canadian society.
• Promote discussion on topics of relevance to Canadian society, with a particular emphasis on emerging issues.
• Bring Muslims of diverse backgrounds together to share knowledge and ideas.
The inaugural program in the series will be launched on Saturday, August 7 at 11am PT | 12pm MT | 2pm ET with the theme of “Muslims in Science and Medicine: Navigating the Currents of COVID-19”.
Register
https://iicanada.org/form/thought-leade ... cellence-0
Daily Diamond
"The great British scientist, Sir Isaac Newton, remarked that if he was able to see further than his predecessors, it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants. Among those giants, who made possible the scientific revolution in Europe, were Ibn Sina, whose ‘Canon of Medicine’ was a standard text for 500 years; Al-Idrisi, the geographer; Ibn Rushd, the philosopher, and a host of other Muslim scientists who had produced the notion of specific gravity, refined Euclid’s theories, perfected solid geometry, evolved trigonometry and algebra, and made modern mathematics possible by developing Indian numerals and the concept of the zero as a numeral of no place , an invention crucial to every aspect of technology from that time onwards to the present day."
Mawlana Hazar Imam, Karachi, Pakistan, March 1983
Sifan Hassan of Netherlands won gold medals in 5000m and 10000m and bronze in 1500m in Olympic Games in Tokyo. 3 medals in one Olympics!
Muslims are indeed making remarkable contributions to their societies in Europe.
Tokyo Olympics: Sifan Hassan wins 10,000m gold for third medal of Games
The Netherlands' Sifan Hassan won the 10,000m to seal her second gold and third medal of the Tokyo Olympics.
The 28-year-old, who had been seeking an unprecedented golden treble, had missed out on that feat when she took bronze in the 1500m but still takes home a hat-trick of medals after adding Saturday's gold to her 5,000m title.
Despite running three races in Tokyo's heat in the last few days, Hassan found an extra gear in the last lap.
She won in 29 minutes 55.32 seconds.
https://www.bbc.com/sport/olympics/58128859
We Want to Hear From Muslim Americans Who Grew Up in the Shadow of Sept. 11
Ask millennial Americans what they remember about the Sept. 11 attacks and many might tell you where they were when the planes hit. Some might recount the American flags that went up in their neighborhoods afterward or the discussions they had in school in the weeks that followed.
Millennial Muslim Americans could tell you about those things, too — but they might also tell you about being interrogated by school principals and the police or being routinely stopped at the airport, even as teenagers.
We want to hear from Muslim Americans who came of age in the wake of Sept. 11. We’re looking to understand more about how navigating the aftermath of the attacks affected their identities and whether that experience changed their relationships with their faith and with America.
Muslim Americans ages 28 to 38, tell us about your experience on and after Sept. 11, 2001
We may publish a selection of your responses in an upcoming article.
Survey questions at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Ask millennial Americans what they remember about the Sept. 11 attacks and many might tell you where they were when the planes hit. Some might recount the American flags that went up in their neighborhoods afterward or the discussions they had in school in the weeks that followed.
Millennial Muslim Americans could tell you about those things, too — but they might also tell you about being interrogated by school principals and the police or being routinely stopped at the airport, even as teenagers.
We want to hear from Muslim Americans who came of age in the wake of Sept. 11. We’re looking to understand more about how navigating the aftermath of the attacks affected their identities and whether that experience changed their relationships with their faith and with America.
Muslim Americans ages 28 to 38, tell us about your experience on and after Sept. 11, 2001
We may publish a selection of your responses in an upcoming article.
Survey questions at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Being demonised has not stopped American Muslims’ impressive rise
Anti-Muslim sentiment has become entrenched among Republicans
The past 20 years have mostly been golden for America’s Muslims. The community has more than doubled in size, to 3.5m. And its prominence in American life has increased exponentially.
Traverse the overpasses of any big city and you will see metallic domes sparkling below. The number of mosques has also more than doubled since 2001. The minority’s secular growth is even more striking. Muslims are one of America’s most educated religious groups. More than 15% of doctors in Michigan are Muslim, though less than 3% of the state’s population is. And Muslim artists, journalists and politicians are catching up.
Mahershala Ali, Ayad Akhtar, Aziz Ansari and Hasan Minhaj are among a generation of award-winning Muslim actors, writers and comedians that has emerged in recent years. Below Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar—the first Muslim women in Congress—sit innumerable Muslim officials, elected onto school boards and into local government. Four centuries after Islam came to America, its Muslims are finding their place.
And yet the Islamophobic backlash the community suffered after the twin towers fell has increased. Half of Americans, including a large majority of Republicans, say Islam encourages violence. That is twice the number who held that view in early 2002. “Though we try to integrate, these are things we live with,” Ali Dabaja, an emergency-care doctor from Michigan, told your columnist. And then he sobbed down the phone as he recalled the time a trucker in Florida tried to run him and his two headscarf-wearing sisters (one a doctor, the other a lawyer) off the road.
Such behaviour occurs not only despite the many Muslim paragons. It is also despite America having witnessed astonishingly little jihadist violence. Islamist attacks are reckoned to have claimed 107 lives since 2001, fewer than white supremacists. And nearly half of those casualties occurred in a mass shooting in a gay club which may not have been motivated by religion. To quote Donald Trump—whose promise to bar Muslims from America was backed by 60% of Republicans—what is going on?
A familiar struggle for America, is the answer, pitting openness and dynamism against nativism and paranoia. Muslims are merely the latest minority to have been embroiled in it.
On the open side of that contest, their growth and success are testament to America’s genius for immigration. Over half of its Muslims were born abroad, including a skilled multitude enticed by the immigration act of 1965. It included the South Asian fathers of Messrs Akhtar, Ansari and Minhaj; the first two doctors, the third a chemist. Having found in America opportunity, religious freedom, civic culture and physical distance from their old lives, such Muslim migrants and their offspring tend to be more patriotic than their European counterparts and much less interested in jihad. The American dream was always an antidote to extremism.
Indeed, it is striking how many Muslims, especially younger, America-born ones, responded to the discrimination they faced after 9/11 by citing America’s promise of liberty. Mr Minhaj, whose hit Netflix show was called “Patriot Act”, describes his father’s and his own conflicting responses to the thugs who smashed their car windows; the older man fearful and resigned, the younger one astonished and incensed. Similarly, Aasim Padela, an emergency-care doctor and expert in Islamic bioethics, said the bigotry he faced even as the twin towers burned “changed my life”. A Cornell medical student at the time, he rushed to help triage the injured; but no Manhattan bus driver would open his doors to him. “My stethoscope could not conceal my beard,” he says. Defiantly he resolved to represent his Muslim values in his medical career.
Yet 9/11 does not explain the growth of anti-Muslim sentiment. George W. Bush tried hard to quell it. Muslim-bashing became nonetheless entrenched on the right mainly because of how it chimed with the broader grievance culture emerging there—especially after the election in 2008 of a black president with a Muslim name. The professed concerns of American Islamophobes underline this. They tend to worry less than their European equivalents about conservative Muslim practices and beliefs (some of which evangelical Christians share), and more about Muslim immigration. When Mr Trump launched himself into politics by suggesting Barack Obama was Muslim as well as foreign, he implied that they were synonymous. He then made Muslim-bashing central to his presidential campaign. Subsequent analysis suggested Islamophobia was his voters’ most characteristic trait. It is a form of bigotry that persists because of the grievances of a dwindling white majority, in other words. It is scarcely about Muslims—especially the reality of America’s prospering minority—at all.
That was also clear ahead of last year’s election, when Mr Trump abruptly turned his sights from Muslims to black activists. The shift was consistent with research suggesting that, for all its ugly noise, Republican Muslim-bashing may be less threatening than opinion polls suggest. Because the Muslim population is based in cities and relatively small, says Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution, nativists have little contact with and are unlikely to focus on Muslims for long: “We are not the main target of xenophobia because there are bigger groups to be racist about.”
Take the medicine
For another consolation, it is abundantly clear who is winning this struggle. The bigotry of the right reflects its members’ lost status. Meanwhile Muslims will continue to rise. Covid-19—or rather the madness the right has made of it—provides a powerful image of those relative positions. The anti-vaxxer Trump voters who are now likeliest to be hospitalised with the disease tend to be the most anti-Muslim Americans. The doctors treating them are quite likely to be Muslim. The irony of this is not lost on Dr Dabaja. “But when people are coping with the reality of death or the death of their loved ones,” he says, “their political agendas tend to fade.
Listen to podcast at:
https://www.economist.com/united-states ... ssive-rise
Anti-Muslim sentiment has become entrenched among Republicans
The past 20 years have mostly been golden for America’s Muslims. The community has more than doubled in size, to 3.5m. And its prominence in American life has increased exponentially.
Traverse the overpasses of any big city and you will see metallic domes sparkling below. The number of mosques has also more than doubled since 2001. The minority’s secular growth is even more striking. Muslims are one of America’s most educated religious groups. More than 15% of doctors in Michigan are Muslim, though less than 3% of the state’s population is. And Muslim artists, journalists and politicians are catching up.
Mahershala Ali, Ayad Akhtar, Aziz Ansari and Hasan Minhaj are among a generation of award-winning Muslim actors, writers and comedians that has emerged in recent years. Below Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar—the first Muslim women in Congress—sit innumerable Muslim officials, elected onto school boards and into local government. Four centuries after Islam came to America, its Muslims are finding their place.
And yet the Islamophobic backlash the community suffered after the twin towers fell has increased. Half of Americans, including a large majority of Republicans, say Islam encourages violence. That is twice the number who held that view in early 2002. “Though we try to integrate, these are things we live with,” Ali Dabaja, an emergency-care doctor from Michigan, told your columnist. And then he sobbed down the phone as he recalled the time a trucker in Florida tried to run him and his two headscarf-wearing sisters (one a doctor, the other a lawyer) off the road.
Such behaviour occurs not only despite the many Muslim paragons. It is also despite America having witnessed astonishingly little jihadist violence. Islamist attacks are reckoned to have claimed 107 lives since 2001, fewer than white supremacists. And nearly half of those casualties occurred in a mass shooting in a gay club which may not have been motivated by religion. To quote Donald Trump—whose promise to bar Muslims from America was backed by 60% of Republicans—what is going on?
A familiar struggle for America, is the answer, pitting openness and dynamism against nativism and paranoia. Muslims are merely the latest minority to have been embroiled in it.
On the open side of that contest, their growth and success are testament to America’s genius for immigration. Over half of its Muslims were born abroad, including a skilled multitude enticed by the immigration act of 1965. It included the South Asian fathers of Messrs Akhtar, Ansari and Minhaj; the first two doctors, the third a chemist. Having found in America opportunity, religious freedom, civic culture and physical distance from their old lives, such Muslim migrants and their offspring tend to be more patriotic than their European counterparts and much less interested in jihad. The American dream was always an antidote to extremism.
Indeed, it is striking how many Muslims, especially younger, America-born ones, responded to the discrimination they faced after 9/11 by citing America’s promise of liberty. Mr Minhaj, whose hit Netflix show was called “Patriot Act”, describes his father’s and his own conflicting responses to the thugs who smashed their car windows; the older man fearful and resigned, the younger one astonished and incensed. Similarly, Aasim Padela, an emergency-care doctor and expert in Islamic bioethics, said the bigotry he faced even as the twin towers burned “changed my life”. A Cornell medical student at the time, he rushed to help triage the injured; but no Manhattan bus driver would open his doors to him. “My stethoscope could not conceal my beard,” he says. Defiantly he resolved to represent his Muslim values in his medical career.
Yet 9/11 does not explain the growth of anti-Muslim sentiment. George W. Bush tried hard to quell it. Muslim-bashing became nonetheless entrenched on the right mainly because of how it chimed with the broader grievance culture emerging there—especially after the election in 2008 of a black president with a Muslim name. The professed concerns of American Islamophobes underline this. They tend to worry less than their European equivalents about conservative Muslim practices and beliefs (some of which evangelical Christians share), and more about Muslim immigration. When Mr Trump launched himself into politics by suggesting Barack Obama was Muslim as well as foreign, he implied that they were synonymous. He then made Muslim-bashing central to his presidential campaign. Subsequent analysis suggested Islamophobia was his voters’ most characteristic trait. It is a form of bigotry that persists because of the grievances of a dwindling white majority, in other words. It is scarcely about Muslims—especially the reality of America’s prospering minority—at all.
That was also clear ahead of last year’s election, when Mr Trump abruptly turned his sights from Muslims to black activists. The shift was consistent with research suggesting that, for all its ugly noise, Republican Muslim-bashing may be less threatening than opinion polls suggest. Because the Muslim population is based in cities and relatively small, says Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution, nativists have little contact with and are unlikely to focus on Muslims for long: “We are not the main target of xenophobia because there are bigger groups to be racist about.”
Take the medicine
For another consolation, it is abundantly clear who is winning this struggle. The bigotry of the right reflects its members’ lost status. Meanwhile Muslims will continue to rise. Covid-19—or rather the madness the right has made of it—provides a powerful image of those relative positions. The anti-vaxxer Trump voters who are now likeliest to be hospitalised with the disease tend to be the most anti-Muslim Americans. The doctors treating them are quite likely to be Muslim. The irony of this is not lost on Dr Dabaja. “But when people are coping with the reality of death or the death of their loved ones,” he says, “their political agendas tend to fade.
Listen to podcast at:
https://www.economist.com/united-states ... ssive-rise
Mawlana Hazar Imam: “From the seventh century to the thirteenth century, the Muslim civilizations dominated world culture”
Posted by Nimira Dewji
The central message of the Quran and Prophetic Tradition to seek knowledge led to the foundation of several institutions of learning. The acquisition of knowledge came to be perceived as a way of improving understanding of the faith and its practices. The pursuit of knowledge was emphasised by Hazrat Ali and his descendants to the present day, by Mawlana Hazar Imam.
The Quran persistently calls on the faithful to ponder the universe in order to understand God’s creation.
Truly, in the creation of the heavens and the earth, and in the alternation of night and day, and the ships which sail upon the sea with that which is of use to people, and the water which Allah sends down from the sky, giving life thereby to the earth after its death, and scattering in it all kinds of beasts, and the changing of the winds, and the clouds obedient between heaven and earth, are indeed signs for people who understand (2:164).
Early Muslim intellectuals searched for knowledge in every domain especially when the Qur’an “explicitly commands the study of the universe and the self as a means to know God” (The Muslim Intellectual Heritage p 111). Hadith Qudsi says:
Neither My Heavens nor My Earth contain Me,
but the heart of My believing servant contains Me.
The primary focus was on the nature of things, “describing and explaining the three fundamental domains…God, the universe, and the human soul” (Ibid. p
.
astronomy astronomers quran revelation knowledge
Astronomers working in the Istanbul observatory, from the Shahinshah-nama (‘History of the King of Kings’) by Mansur Shirazi, Turkey, 16th century. Source: The Institute of Ismaili Studies
Furthermore, the need to make the works of previous civilisations available more widely led to a translation and compilation movement whereby Greek, Persian, Indian, Chinese, and Byzantium materials were translated into Arabic beginning around 800 CE, whose effects are felt today.
Endowed institutions were established such as the Bayt al-Hikma by the Abbasids, Al-Azhar and Dar al-Hikma by the Fatimid Ismaili dynasty, among others, as well as libraries, hospitals, observatories, which flourished even after the disintegration of the major empires and the establishment of local dynasties. Additionally, original texts were being written in Arabic, and by the tenth century, Islamic civilisations were characterised by a diversity of intellectual and literary traditions in various fields: philosophy, law, mysticism, arts, music, natural sciences, among others. An encyclopaedic work, the Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa, compiled around the tenth century by an anonymous group of Shia members (likely Ismaili scholars), occupied a prominent position in the history of scientific and philosophical ideas owing to the wide intellectual reception and dissemination of diverse manuscripts. The Ikhwan emphasised knowledge of oneself as a path towards knowledge of the Creator.
“[The] openness to other religions, to different ideas and theories, led to exciting developments in Islamic philosophy and science…” (Leaman, Intellectual Traditions in Islam p 42).
During the Fatimid period (909-1171), Isma’ili philosophy “stands as one of the richest schools of thought in early Islamic history. The Isma’ili espousal of the intellectual sciences in general was instrumental in the development of the sciences. This is particularly evident in Fatimid Egypt which was witness to the activity of some of the greatest Islamic scientists”( S.H. Nasr, Ismai’ili Contributions to Islamic Culture p 1-2).
Al-Azhar, founded by Caliph-Imam al-Mu’izz, “evolved into a leading institution of Islamic scholarship, attracting students from across the Muslim world. The priority given to the development of al-Azhar, which ranks among the oldest institutions of higher education in the world, is reflective of the Fatimid commitment to the promotion of knowledge, consistent with the teachings of the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad” (Jiwa, Towards a Shi’i Mediterranean Empire p 21).
(See Prominent da’is made important contributions to intellectual development https://nimirasblog.wordpress.com/2018/ ... raditions/ )
The development of astronomy and the increase in the precision of astronomical instruments evolved in close relationship with religious institutions of learning. Muslim astronomers designed new instruments, revising older ones, and sometimes building extremely large instruments to increase accuracy. The astrolabe is an example of an astronomical instrument that was derived from the Greeks but was improved by Islamic astronomers.
Planispheric astrolabe, Spain (Historic al-Andalus) dated 1300s. The inscriptions on its surface are in three languages: Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew. Source: Aga Khan Museum
Primarily used for determining the position of celestial bodies, it was combined with a number of movable plates and arcs to graphically solve complex trigonometrical functions and thereby determine direction of prayer.
Rear view of sextant used for determining the angle between the horizon and a celestial body. Source: Igor Demchenko/Archnet
In astronomy, most of the Arabic star names we use today can be traced back to the star catalogue of the astronomer al-Sufi, known in medieval Europe as Azophi. In 903, al-Sufi published the first-ever critical revision of Ptolemy’s star catalogue, corrected erroneous observations, and added new ones. Al-Sufi’s treatise on star cartography titled The Book of Constellations of the Fixed Stars became a classic of Islamic astronomy (Lebling).
The contribution of classical and medieval Islamic science to contemporary mathematics survives in our continuing usage of the terms “Arabic numerals,” “algorithm,” and “algebra” which came to be established as an independent mathematical subject. Mathematicians of Islamic civilisations were also engaged in geometry, trigonometry, as well as the solution of equations.
During the thirteenth century, Arabic philosophical, medical, astronomical, and pharmaceutical manuscripts were translated into Latin in Toledo, Spain and Palermo, Sicily. Known in the West as Avicenna, the Persian scholar Ibn Sina’s (d.1037) five-volume medical book Qanun fi’l-tibb (Canon of Medicine), was translated into Latin, becoming the most influential medical encyclopaedia that was used as a textbook in European universities well into the eighteenth century.
Canon of Medicine Volume 5, dated 1052 Iran or Iraq. Source: Aga khan Museum.
The title page of the 1556 edition of Avicenna’s The Canon of Medicine. Source: The Reynolds Historical Library
Ibn Butlan (d.1066) wrote about good health and hygiene based on moderate lifestyles in Taqwim al-Sihhah bi’l-Asbab (Maintenance of Health Through Six Methods), which was translated into Latin in Sicily in 1266 under the title Tacuinum Sanitatis, subsequently becoming a popular text in Europe.
Jabir ibn Hayyan (d. ca 813), a student of Imam Jafar al-Sadiq, produced numerous works on the processes of distillation, crystalisation, and other chemical operations that were subsequently used for several centuries in Islamic regions as well as in Europe, where he was known as Geber.
In mathematics: the continued use of the terms “Arabic numerals,” “algorithm,” and “algebra,” as well as the establishment of algebra as an independent mathematical subject; plane and spherical geometry trigonometry, and the solution of higher orders of equation. The field of optics, pioneered by Ibn al-Haytham, who worked in Fatimid Cairo, introduced the scientific method. Known in the West as Alhazen, his Optics was the foundation upon which Kepler built the modern science of optics in the sixteenth century initiating further research that formulated new planetary models. Prominent among these revised models was the work of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (d. 1274), who spent thirty years at the Ismaili fortress of Alamut, after having been profoundly influenced by the writings of Imam Hasan ala dhikrihi’l-salam. Copernicus (d. 1543), whose work refers to the views of Muslim astronomers, also raised similar objections to Ptolemy’s geocentric model (Dhanani).
Frontispiece of the Latin translation of Ibn al- Haytham’s Optics titled Opticae Thesaurus Alhazeni Arabis Libri Septem (The Optic Treasure, Seven Arabic Books of Alhazen) published in Basel, in 1572. Source: Research Gate
Al-Khwarizmi’s work was responsible for the introduction of the decimal place value system and the Indo-Arab numerals; and the work of Muslim mathematicians introduced Europe to algebra and trigonometry.
Historians credit al-Farabi (d. ca 950), known in the West as Alfarabius or Avennasa, for preserving the works of Aristotle that otherwise might have been lost during the Dark Ages. One of his more famous books, titled The Bezels of Wisdom, remained a textbook of philosophy for several centuries at various centres of learning in Europe. Al-Farabi also wrote respected works on mathematics, political science, astronomy, and sociology.
“Scientific learning became part of Islamic societies to which Jews and Christians contributed along with Muslims to the intellectual and cultural life” (Newby, Almanac p 426).
In philosophy and theology, the views of Avicenna, Averroes [Ibn Rushd]… and their readings of Aristotle are discernable in the works of Latin scholastics like Albertus Magnus [d. 1280] and his student Thomas Aquinas [d. 1274]. Whereas Albertus Magnus, Aquinas, and others accepted a limited role for reason within the overall context of faith, the writings of Averroes were seen to champion unaided reason. The Muslim philosophers’ views on the active intellect, the eternity of the world, the nature of God, and so on were also considered to be contrary to Christian teachings. Some Latin writers like Siger of Brabant became proponent of these views and “founded” the movement characterized as Latin Averroism” (Dhanani).
“In the Iberian peninsula and North Africa, Jews, Christians, and Muslims combined in a society that is often described by later historians with the adjective “golden.” The areas of poetry, music, art, architecture… philosophy, medicine… were shared among all the inhabitants…In the eastern Mediterranean, similar symbiotic societies could be found. The universities of Al-Azhar in Cairo and Cordoba in Spain, both founded in the tenth century, followed the older model of the Bayt al-Hikma in Baghdad as places of shared learning among scholars from the three traditions. Both the concept of these types of institutions of learning, and the learning itself they produced, had profound influence on European institutions of higher education and European scientific advancement” (Newby, “Muslim-Jewish-Christian Interaction” The Muslim Almanac p 426).
W. Montogomery Watt, in his book The Influence of Islam on Medieval Europe states:
“… it is clear that the influence of Islam on Western Christendom is greater than is usually realized. Not only did Islam share with Western Europe many material products and technological discoveries; not only did it stimulate Europe intellectually in the fields of science and philosophy; but it provoked Europe into formulating a new image of itself” (cited by Makdisi in The Rise of Colleges, p 286).
Mawlana Hazar Imam delivering Commencement Address at Brown University. Image: AKDN/Gary Otte
“From the seventh century to the thirteenth century, the Muslim civilizations dominated world culture, accepting, adopting, using and preserving all preceding study of mathematics, philosophy, medicine and astronomy, among other areas of learning. The Islamic field of thought and knowledge included and added to much of the information on which all civilisations are founded. And yet this fact is seldom acknowledged today, be it in the West or in the Muslim world, and this amnesia has left a six hundred year gap in the history of human thought.”
Mawlana Hazar Imam
Commencement Ceremony at the Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA
May 26, 1996
Speech
Sources:
Aga Khan Museum Catalogue, Pattern and Light, Skira Rizzoli, 2014
Gordon Newby, “Muslim Jewish Christian Interaction,” The Muslim Almanac Ed. Azim A. Nanji, Gale Research, Detroit, 1996
Oliver Leaman, “Scientific and Philosophical Enquiry,” Intellectual Traditions in Islam Ed. Farhad Daftary, I.B. Tauris, London, 2000
Ibn al-Haytham’s Scientific Method, The UNESCO Courier, July-August 2009
Robert W. Lebling, Arabic in the Sky, Aramco, September/October 2010
Rasdkhanah-i Ulugh Beg, Samarkand, Uzbekistan, Archnet
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Intellect and Intuition: Their Relationship from the Islamic Perspective
Shianool Jiwa, Towards a Shi’i Mediterranean Empire, I.B. Tauris, London, 2009
William C. Chittick, The Muslim Intellectual Heritage and Its Perception in Europe, Central and Eastern European Online Library (PDF)
https://nimirasblog.wordpress.com/2021/ ... d-culture/
Posted by Nimira Dewji
The central message of the Quran and Prophetic Tradition to seek knowledge led to the foundation of several institutions of learning. The acquisition of knowledge came to be perceived as a way of improving understanding of the faith and its practices. The pursuit of knowledge was emphasised by Hazrat Ali and his descendants to the present day, by Mawlana Hazar Imam.
The Quran persistently calls on the faithful to ponder the universe in order to understand God’s creation.
Truly, in the creation of the heavens and the earth, and in the alternation of night and day, and the ships which sail upon the sea with that which is of use to people, and the water which Allah sends down from the sky, giving life thereby to the earth after its death, and scattering in it all kinds of beasts, and the changing of the winds, and the clouds obedient between heaven and earth, are indeed signs for people who understand (2:164).
Early Muslim intellectuals searched for knowledge in every domain especially when the Qur’an “explicitly commands the study of the universe and the self as a means to know God” (The Muslim Intellectual Heritage p 111). Hadith Qudsi says:
Neither My Heavens nor My Earth contain Me,
but the heart of My believing servant contains Me.
The primary focus was on the nature of things, “describing and explaining the three fundamental domains…God, the universe, and the human soul” (Ibid. p
.astronomy astronomers quran revelation knowledge
Astronomers working in the Istanbul observatory, from the Shahinshah-nama (‘History of the King of Kings’) by Mansur Shirazi, Turkey, 16th century. Source: The Institute of Ismaili Studies
Furthermore, the need to make the works of previous civilisations available more widely led to a translation and compilation movement whereby Greek, Persian, Indian, Chinese, and Byzantium materials were translated into Arabic beginning around 800 CE, whose effects are felt today.
Endowed institutions were established such as the Bayt al-Hikma by the Abbasids, Al-Azhar and Dar al-Hikma by the Fatimid Ismaili dynasty, among others, as well as libraries, hospitals, observatories, which flourished even after the disintegration of the major empires and the establishment of local dynasties. Additionally, original texts were being written in Arabic, and by the tenth century, Islamic civilisations were characterised by a diversity of intellectual and literary traditions in various fields: philosophy, law, mysticism, arts, music, natural sciences, among others. An encyclopaedic work, the Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa, compiled around the tenth century by an anonymous group of Shia members (likely Ismaili scholars), occupied a prominent position in the history of scientific and philosophical ideas owing to the wide intellectual reception and dissemination of diverse manuscripts. The Ikhwan emphasised knowledge of oneself as a path towards knowledge of the Creator.
“[The] openness to other religions, to different ideas and theories, led to exciting developments in Islamic philosophy and science…” (Leaman, Intellectual Traditions in Islam p 42).
During the Fatimid period (909-1171), Isma’ili philosophy “stands as one of the richest schools of thought in early Islamic history. The Isma’ili espousal of the intellectual sciences in general was instrumental in the development of the sciences. This is particularly evident in Fatimid Egypt which was witness to the activity of some of the greatest Islamic scientists”( S.H. Nasr, Ismai’ili Contributions to Islamic Culture p 1-2).
Al-Azhar, founded by Caliph-Imam al-Mu’izz, “evolved into a leading institution of Islamic scholarship, attracting students from across the Muslim world. The priority given to the development of al-Azhar, which ranks among the oldest institutions of higher education in the world, is reflective of the Fatimid commitment to the promotion of knowledge, consistent with the teachings of the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad” (Jiwa, Towards a Shi’i Mediterranean Empire p 21).
(See Prominent da’is made important contributions to intellectual development https://nimirasblog.wordpress.com/2018/ ... raditions/ )
The development of astronomy and the increase in the precision of astronomical instruments evolved in close relationship with religious institutions of learning. Muslim astronomers designed new instruments, revising older ones, and sometimes building extremely large instruments to increase accuracy. The astrolabe is an example of an astronomical instrument that was derived from the Greeks but was improved by Islamic astronomers.
Planispheric astrolabe, Spain (Historic al-Andalus) dated 1300s. The inscriptions on its surface are in three languages: Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew. Source: Aga Khan Museum
Primarily used for determining the position of celestial bodies, it was combined with a number of movable plates and arcs to graphically solve complex trigonometrical functions and thereby determine direction of prayer.
Rear view of sextant used for determining the angle between the horizon and a celestial body. Source: Igor Demchenko/Archnet
In astronomy, most of the Arabic star names we use today can be traced back to the star catalogue of the astronomer al-Sufi, known in medieval Europe as Azophi. In 903, al-Sufi published the first-ever critical revision of Ptolemy’s star catalogue, corrected erroneous observations, and added new ones. Al-Sufi’s treatise on star cartography titled The Book of Constellations of the Fixed Stars became a classic of Islamic astronomy (Lebling).
The contribution of classical and medieval Islamic science to contemporary mathematics survives in our continuing usage of the terms “Arabic numerals,” “algorithm,” and “algebra” which came to be established as an independent mathematical subject. Mathematicians of Islamic civilisations were also engaged in geometry, trigonometry, as well as the solution of equations.
During the thirteenth century, Arabic philosophical, medical, astronomical, and pharmaceutical manuscripts were translated into Latin in Toledo, Spain and Palermo, Sicily. Known in the West as Avicenna, the Persian scholar Ibn Sina’s (d.1037) five-volume medical book Qanun fi’l-tibb (Canon of Medicine), was translated into Latin, becoming the most influential medical encyclopaedia that was used as a textbook in European universities well into the eighteenth century.
Canon of Medicine Volume 5, dated 1052 Iran or Iraq. Source: Aga khan Museum.
The title page of the 1556 edition of Avicenna’s The Canon of Medicine. Source: The Reynolds Historical Library
Ibn Butlan (d.1066) wrote about good health and hygiene based on moderate lifestyles in Taqwim al-Sihhah bi’l-Asbab (Maintenance of Health Through Six Methods), which was translated into Latin in Sicily in 1266 under the title Tacuinum Sanitatis, subsequently becoming a popular text in Europe.
Jabir ibn Hayyan (d. ca 813), a student of Imam Jafar al-Sadiq, produced numerous works on the processes of distillation, crystalisation, and other chemical operations that were subsequently used for several centuries in Islamic regions as well as in Europe, where he was known as Geber.
In mathematics: the continued use of the terms “Arabic numerals,” “algorithm,” and “algebra,” as well as the establishment of algebra as an independent mathematical subject; plane and spherical geometry trigonometry, and the solution of higher orders of equation. The field of optics, pioneered by Ibn al-Haytham, who worked in Fatimid Cairo, introduced the scientific method. Known in the West as Alhazen, his Optics was the foundation upon which Kepler built the modern science of optics in the sixteenth century initiating further research that formulated new planetary models. Prominent among these revised models was the work of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (d. 1274), who spent thirty years at the Ismaili fortress of Alamut, after having been profoundly influenced by the writings of Imam Hasan ala dhikrihi’l-salam. Copernicus (d. 1543), whose work refers to the views of Muslim astronomers, also raised similar objections to Ptolemy’s geocentric model (Dhanani).
Frontispiece of the Latin translation of Ibn al- Haytham’s Optics titled Opticae Thesaurus Alhazeni Arabis Libri Septem (The Optic Treasure, Seven Arabic Books of Alhazen) published in Basel, in 1572. Source: Research Gate
Al-Khwarizmi’s work was responsible for the introduction of the decimal place value system and the Indo-Arab numerals; and the work of Muslim mathematicians introduced Europe to algebra and trigonometry.
Historians credit al-Farabi (d. ca 950), known in the West as Alfarabius or Avennasa, for preserving the works of Aristotle that otherwise might have been lost during the Dark Ages. One of his more famous books, titled The Bezels of Wisdom, remained a textbook of philosophy for several centuries at various centres of learning in Europe. Al-Farabi also wrote respected works on mathematics, political science, astronomy, and sociology.
“Scientific learning became part of Islamic societies to which Jews and Christians contributed along with Muslims to the intellectual and cultural life” (Newby, Almanac p 426).
In philosophy and theology, the views of Avicenna, Averroes [Ibn Rushd]… and their readings of Aristotle are discernable in the works of Latin scholastics like Albertus Magnus [d. 1280] and his student Thomas Aquinas [d. 1274]. Whereas Albertus Magnus, Aquinas, and others accepted a limited role for reason within the overall context of faith, the writings of Averroes were seen to champion unaided reason. The Muslim philosophers’ views on the active intellect, the eternity of the world, the nature of God, and so on were also considered to be contrary to Christian teachings. Some Latin writers like Siger of Brabant became proponent of these views and “founded” the movement characterized as Latin Averroism” (Dhanani).
“In the Iberian peninsula and North Africa, Jews, Christians, and Muslims combined in a society that is often described by later historians with the adjective “golden.” The areas of poetry, music, art, architecture… philosophy, medicine… were shared among all the inhabitants…In the eastern Mediterranean, similar symbiotic societies could be found. The universities of Al-Azhar in Cairo and Cordoba in Spain, both founded in the tenth century, followed the older model of the Bayt al-Hikma in Baghdad as places of shared learning among scholars from the three traditions. Both the concept of these types of institutions of learning, and the learning itself they produced, had profound influence on European institutions of higher education and European scientific advancement” (Newby, “Muslim-Jewish-Christian Interaction” The Muslim Almanac p 426).
W. Montogomery Watt, in his book The Influence of Islam on Medieval Europe states:
“… it is clear that the influence of Islam on Western Christendom is greater than is usually realized. Not only did Islam share with Western Europe many material products and technological discoveries; not only did it stimulate Europe intellectually in the fields of science and philosophy; but it provoked Europe into formulating a new image of itself” (cited by Makdisi in The Rise of Colleges, p 286).
Mawlana Hazar Imam delivering Commencement Address at Brown University. Image: AKDN/Gary Otte
“From the seventh century to the thirteenth century, the Muslim civilizations dominated world culture, accepting, adopting, using and preserving all preceding study of mathematics, philosophy, medicine and astronomy, among other areas of learning. The Islamic field of thought and knowledge included and added to much of the information on which all civilisations are founded. And yet this fact is seldom acknowledged today, be it in the West or in the Muslim world, and this amnesia has left a six hundred year gap in the history of human thought.”
Mawlana Hazar Imam
Commencement Ceremony at the Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA
May 26, 1996
Speech
Sources:
Aga Khan Museum Catalogue, Pattern and Light, Skira Rizzoli, 2014
Gordon Newby, “Muslim Jewish Christian Interaction,” The Muslim Almanac Ed. Azim A. Nanji, Gale Research, Detroit, 1996
Oliver Leaman, “Scientific and Philosophical Enquiry,” Intellectual Traditions in Islam Ed. Farhad Daftary, I.B. Tauris, London, 2000
Ibn al-Haytham’s Scientific Method, The UNESCO Courier, July-August 2009
Robert W. Lebling, Arabic in the Sky, Aramco, September/October 2010
Rasdkhanah-i Ulugh Beg, Samarkand, Uzbekistan, Archnet
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Intellect and Intuition: Their Relationship from the Islamic Perspective
Shianool Jiwa, Towards a Shi’i Mediterranean Empire, I.B. Tauris, London, 2009
William C. Chittick, The Muslim Intellectual Heritage and Its Perception in Europe, Central and Eastern European Online Library (PDF)
https://nimirasblog.wordpress.com/2021/ ... d-culture/
The US city run by Muslim Americans
A walk down the main street in Hamtramck, Michigan, feels like a tour around the world.
A Polish sausage store and an Eastern European bakery sit alongside a Yemeni department store and a Bengali clothing shop. Church bells ring out along with the Islamic call to prayer.
"The world in two square miles" - Hamtramck lives up to its slogan, with around 30 languages spoken within its 5 sq km area.
This month, the Midwestern city of 28,000 has reached a milestone. Hamtramck has elected an all-Muslim City Council and a Muslim mayor, becoming the first in the US to have a Muslim-American government.
Once faced with discrimination, Muslim residents have become integral to this multicultural city, and now make up more than half its population.
And despite economic challenges and intense cultural debates, residents in Hamtramck from different religious and cultural backgrounds coexist in harmony, making the city a meaningful case study for America's future of rising diversity.
More...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59212355
A walk down the main street in Hamtramck, Michigan, feels like a tour around the world.
A Polish sausage store and an Eastern European bakery sit alongside a Yemeni department store and a Bengali clothing shop. Church bells ring out along with the Islamic call to prayer.
"The world in two square miles" - Hamtramck lives up to its slogan, with around 30 languages spoken within its 5 sq km area.
This month, the Midwestern city of 28,000 has reached a milestone. Hamtramck has elected an all-Muslim City Council and a Muslim mayor, becoming the first in the US to have a Muslim-American government.
Once faced with discrimination, Muslim residents have become integral to this multicultural city, and now make up more than half its population.
And despite economic challenges and intense cultural debates, residents in Hamtramck from different religious and cultural backgrounds coexist in harmony, making the city a meaningful case study for America's future of rising diversity.
More...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59212355
Did you know the work of the astronomer Copernicus is based on the work of Muslim astronomers, such as Nasir al-Din al-Tusi?
Many scholars today considered that the work of Nicolaus Copernicus – the Russian polymath who revolutionised 16th century Europe by arguing that the earth revolved around the sun rather than vice-versa – was heavily indebted to the advances in astronomy made by the 13th century Muslim scholars Nasir al-Din al-Tusi and Mu’ayyad al-Din al-Urdi.
Spanish
Some modern scholars go so far as to say that their work is organically embedded within Copernican astronomy to the point that removing their scholarship would destroy the mathematical integrity of Copernicus’s model. Some even refer to Copernicus as “the last member of the Maragha school of astronomy,” named after the observatory in Maragheh, Iran, founded by al-Tusi.
The 14th century Arab astronomer Ibn al-Shatir, who was the chief muezzin of the Umayyad mosque in Damascus, administering the times for 5 daily prayers, based on the position of the sun in the sky, created a heliocentric or sun-centric model of the cosmos that was later found in Copernicus’s key work published in 1543: De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the revolutions of the heavenly spheres).
The Persian polymath Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (1201-1274) went to work with the Ismaili rulers of Alamut, where he spent many years composing some of his most important works. After his death, his influence continued in fields as diverse as ethics, philosophy, mathematics, logic and astronomy. He invented a geometrical technique called the 'Tusi couple,' which generates linear motion from the sum of two circular motions.
The Spanish-Jewish author Abner of Burgos (1270–1340) was familiar with the Tusi couple and followed Tusi’s notation in his diagrams. From Spain al-Tusi theories spread through Europe. The Tusi couple was introduced by Copernicus in his De Revolutionibus. Another of Tusi´s astronomical manuscripts, which was used in Italy by 1475 CE, includes a treatise dealing with planetary theory that contains diagrams of a Tusi couple and lunar model.
Adaptation of the article “Thought of the Week” (Al-Saha ITREB UK 5/11/2021)
https://the.ismaili/portugal/did-you-kn ... omers-such
Many scholars today considered that the work of Nicolaus Copernicus – the Russian polymath who revolutionised 16th century Europe by arguing that the earth revolved around the sun rather than vice-versa – was heavily indebted to the advances in astronomy made by the 13th century Muslim scholars Nasir al-Din al-Tusi and Mu’ayyad al-Din al-Urdi.
Spanish
Some modern scholars go so far as to say that their work is organically embedded within Copernican astronomy to the point that removing their scholarship would destroy the mathematical integrity of Copernicus’s model. Some even refer to Copernicus as “the last member of the Maragha school of astronomy,” named after the observatory in Maragheh, Iran, founded by al-Tusi.
The 14th century Arab astronomer Ibn al-Shatir, who was the chief muezzin of the Umayyad mosque in Damascus, administering the times for 5 daily prayers, based on the position of the sun in the sky, created a heliocentric or sun-centric model of the cosmos that was later found in Copernicus’s key work published in 1543: De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the revolutions of the heavenly spheres).
The Persian polymath Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (1201-1274) went to work with the Ismaili rulers of Alamut, where he spent many years composing some of his most important works. After his death, his influence continued in fields as diverse as ethics, philosophy, mathematics, logic and astronomy. He invented a geometrical technique called the 'Tusi couple,' which generates linear motion from the sum of two circular motions.
The Spanish-Jewish author Abner of Burgos (1270–1340) was familiar with the Tusi couple and followed Tusi’s notation in his diagrams. From Spain al-Tusi theories spread through Europe. The Tusi couple was introduced by Copernicus in his De Revolutionibus. Another of Tusi´s astronomical manuscripts, which was used in Italy by 1475 CE, includes a treatise dealing with planetary theory that contains diagrams of a Tusi couple and lunar model.
Adaptation of the article “Thought of the Week” (Al-Saha ITREB UK 5/11/2021)
https://the.ismaili/portugal/did-you-kn ... omers-such
College Program on Islam: Translating The Past - Reclaiming Traditions
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dvVbziqT4s
In the second installment of the 2021 winter mini-series program, CPOI invites you to hear from scholar and author, Dr. Shobhana Xavier as she explores the realities of transmitting and translating culture and faith as a result of our movement from our nations that hold our cultural heritage to the West.
******
College Program on Islam: Outsiders at Home - Claiming Our Identity
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqdfoAi6-3c
In the final session of CPOI's 2021 mini-series, please join us to hear from a panel of experts: Dr. Moustafa Bayoumi, Dr. Sunaina Maira, and Dr. Hussein Rashid as they share their perspectives and insights about being the challenges and responsibilities of being a Muslim-American in a post-9/11
******
College Program on Islam: Being Muslim Tracing Roots
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2QUKtZHZKc
As a part of the 2021 winter mini-series program, CPOI brings you a special presentation from professor, scholar, and published author, Dr. Edward E. Curtis IV, as he discusses the diverse histories and entrance of Islam in America and helps us identify how deeply embedded Muslims are in the foundation and shaping of the United States we know today.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dvVbziqT4s
In the second installment of the 2021 winter mini-series program, CPOI invites you to hear from scholar and author, Dr. Shobhana Xavier as she explores the realities of transmitting and translating culture and faith as a result of our movement from our nations that hold our cultural heritage to the West.
******
College Program on Islam: Outsiders at Home - Claiming Our Identity
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqdfoAi6-3c
In the final session of CPOI's 2021 mini-series, please join us to hear from a panel of experts: Dr. Moustafa Bayoumi, Dr. Sunaina Maira, and Dr. Hussein Rashid as they share their perspectives and insights about being the challenges and responsibilities of being a Muslim-American in a post-9/11
******
College Program on Islam: Being Muslim Tracing Roots
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2QUKtZHZKc
As a part of the 2021 winter mini-series program, CPOI brings you a special presentation from professor, scholar, and published author, Dr. Edward E. Curtis IV, as he discusses the diverse histories and entrance of Islam in America and helps us identify how deeply embedded Muslims are in the foundation and shaping of the United States we know today.
Re: Perception of Islam
Islamic Civilisations - A Transformational Force in Humanity
“O mankind, We have created you from a male and a female and made you into races and tribes, so that you may identify one another.” A verse from Surah Al-Hujurat 49:13
A civilisation cannot exist without culture, and culture cannot exist without knowledge. The pursuit of knowledge is not just a right, but also an obligation on the part of the Muslim. The hunt for knowledge as a crucial concept - with no temporal or geographical limitations - has been established throughout history. Knowledge has always been an ubiquitous virtue in Islamic life, permeating all fields of learning, whether social, political, intellectual, artistic or spiritual. Indeed, the expansion of Islam's culture and values stems from the exchange of knowledge across Muslim civilisations. It is considered a charity to learn, act appropriately, and educate, according to Prophetic tradition, which breaks knowledge acquisition into three steps: learning, action, and sharing.
Throughout history, Muslim pioneers have shown respect for various civilisations and tolerance for other humans, regardless of their faith. The process of learning, absorbing and adapting is what has contributed to this wonderful synthesis and unification of different cultures: those of the conquered and that of the conqueror.
The most potent formative powers of a civilisation emanate from a religious underpinning. What people think and how they officially and behaviourally display it in their lives define the culture.
Culture encompasses a society's perception of knowledge, and what it perceives to be its true sources, as well as its belief system and shared vision of how the world works. Muslim civilisations entail core aspects that demonstrate a high degree of plurality and diversity. They have adapted many intellectual and cultural elements from other civilisations giving it a cosmopolitan quality, simultaneously making it a significant tributary to the Renaissance in Europe and a vital component of a universal civilisation.
One of the main ways in which this cultural manifestation of Muslim civilisations comes to life is through the Arabic language. This language, as an initial cultural vehicle, was the principal medium of expression in Arabia, the place where Islam and its culture lay its foundation, as the language of revelation. As years passed, and as different dynasties took over - the Ottoman Turks or the Mongols - they learned Arabic without forsaking their own tongues, but rather, influencing them. It was this striking blend of dialects, this cross-fertilisation, which inevitably led to the process of sharing knowledge.
Muslim history began with Prophet Muhamad (PBUH), during the 7th century in Arabia, which expanded into different geographical regions, beginning from the first four Caliphs (Rashiduns). This phase was followed by the rise of major caliphates including the Umayyads and the Abbasids.
As Muslim rule spread further, regional dynasties began to emerge, leading to shifts in power and the rise of new centres of culture and creativity.
Throughout each of its phases, until today, we have seen Muslim culture interact, exchange and engage with its environment and context, proving itself to be a catalyst for improving quality of life in its broadest sense. Today this culture is seen in the way seven billion Muslims, who live in different parts of the world, engage with their surroundings. Further, we see culture come alive in modern times, through the work of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC), and the Institute of Ismaili Studies, London.
Another important element of cultural manifestation is architecture. Islam adapted its architecture from Arabia. The first mosque in Islam, the Prophet's mosque, or Masjid-e-Nabwi - was built using palm trees and baked bricks, and had a courtyard. It was used as a space for prayer, as well as a space for social gathering. It became a model for mosques built in the early period. Traditionally, Islamic architecture was developed to fulfil Islamic religious practices, such as the minaret to assist the muezzin.
As Islam expanded, there was a shift in the way moques were built. Many architectural elements are adapted from the Roman Byzantine and Persian lands, such as Islamic calligraphy on the surfaces, gardens, a concept originated in Persia, and domes. Over time, these mosques also became architectural masterpieces, and survive to the present day. Some of these early mosques are the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, Al Mansur Mosque in Baghdad, the Great Mosque of Qayrawan, Ibn Tulun Mosque in Cairo, the Great Mosque of Cordoba and the Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo among many others.
In conclusion, Islamic history is the product of a conversation between various cultures, nations, and tribes, as well as the past, present, and future. The oral tradition of Islam is based upon the transmission of culture through poetry and narrative, and the written record, which has had the greatest impact on society. The value of education and knowledge derived from the Qur’an, the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and history continues to be observed celebrated by Mawlana Hazar Imam through the the Aga Khan Development Network, in the areas of music, architecture and culture.
https://the.ismaili/uae/islamic-civilis ... e-humanity
“O mankind, We have created you from a male and a female and made you into races and tribes, so that you may identify one another.” A verse from Surah Al-Hujurat 49:13
A civilisation cannot exist without culture, and culture cannot exist without knowledge. The pursuit of knowledge is not just a right, but also an obligation on the part of the Muslim. The hunt for knowledge as a crucial concept - with no temporal or geographical limitations - has been established throughout history. Knowledge has always been an ubiquitous virtue in Islamic life, permeating all fields of learning, whether social, political, intellectual, artistic or spiritual. Indeed, the expansion of Islam's culture and values stems from the exchange of knowledge across Muslim civilisations. It is considered a charity to learn, act appropriately, and educate, according to Prophetic tradition, which breaks knowledge acquisition into three steps: learning, action, and sharing.
Throughout history, Muslim pioneers have shown respect for various civilisations and tolerance for other humans, regardless of their faith. The process of learning, absorbing and adapting is what has contributed to this wonderful synthesis and unification of different cultures: those of the conquered and that of the conqueror.
The most potent formative powers of a civilisation emanate from a religious underpinning. What people think and how they officially and behaviourally display it in their lives define the culture.
Culture encompasses a society's perception of knowledge, and what it perceives to be its true sources, as well as its belief system and shared vision of how the world works. Muslim civilisations entail core aspects that demonstrate a high degree of plurality and diversity. They have adapted many intellectual and cultural elements from other civilisations giving it a cosmopolitan quality, simultaneously making it a significant tributary to the Renaissance in Europe and a vital component of a universal civilisation.
One of the main ways in which this cultural manifestation of Muslim civilisations comes to life is through the Arabic language. This language, as an initial cultural vehicle, was the principal medium of expression in Arabia, the place where Islam and its culture lay its foundation, as the language of revelation. As years passed, and as different dynasties took over - the Ottoman Turks or the Mongols - they learned Arabic without forsaking their own tongues, but rather, influencing them. It was this striking blend of dialects, this cross-fertilisation, which inevitably led to the process of sharing knowledge.
Muslim history began with Prophet Muhamad (PBUH), during the 7th century in Arabia, which expanded into different geographical regions, beginning from the first four Caliphs (Rashiduns). This phase was followed by the rise of major caliphates including the Umayyads and the Abbasids.
As Muslim rule spread further, regional dynasties began to emerge, leading to shifts in power and the rise of new centres of culture and creativity.
Throughout each of its phases, until today, we have seen Muslim culture interact, exchange and engage with its environment and context, proving itself to be a catalyst for improving quality of life in its broadest sense. Today this culture is seen in the way seven billion Muslims, who live in different parts of the world, engage with their surroundings. Further, we see culture come alive in modern times, through the work of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC), and the Institute of Ismaili Studies, London.
Another important element of cultural manifestation is architecture. Islam adapted its architecture from Arabia. The first mosque in Islam, the Prophet's mosque, or Masjid-e-Nabwi - was built using palm trees and baked bricks, and had a courtyard. It was used as a space for prayer, as well as a space for social gathering. It became a model for mosques built in the early period. Traditionally, Islamic architecture was developed to fulfil Islamic religious practices, such as the minaret to assist the muezzin.
As Islam expanded, there was a shift in the way moques were built. Many architectural elements are adapted from the Roman Byzantine and Persian lands, such as Islamic calligraphy on the surfaces, gardens, a concept originated in Persia, and domes. Over time, these mosques also became architectural masterpieces, and survive to the present day. Some of these early mosques are the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, Al Mansur Mosque in Baghdad, the Great Mosque of Qayrawan, Ibn Tulun Mosque in Cairo, the Great Mosque of Cordoba and the Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo among many others.
In conclusion, Islamic history is the product of a conversation between various cultures, nations, and tribes, as well as the past, present, and future. The oral tradition of Islam is based upon the transmission of culture through poetry and narrative, and the written record, which has had the greatest impact on society. The value of education and knowledge derived from the Qur’an, the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and history continues to be observed celebrated by Mawlana Hazar Imam through the the Aga Khan Development Network, in the areas of music, architecture and culture.
https://the.ismaili/uae/islamic-civilis ... e-humanity
The Impact of Islam on European Civilization
The Impact of Islam on European Civilization
Mohammad Fanaei Eshkevari
(published in Horizons of Thought Vol.1, 2014)
Table of Contents
[Preface] ......................................................................3
Science and Civilization in Islam ...........................................4
Ways of Influence ............................................................5
1. European Intermingle with Muslims ....................................5
[2. Crusades] ................................................................6
3. Trade .....................................................................7
4. Translation ...............................................................8
Some Areas of Impact .......................................................9
Philosophy ..................................................................9
Ibn Sina.................................................................10
Ghazali .................................................................11
Ibn Rushd ..............................................................12
Mathematics ..............................................................14
Astronomy ................................................................15
Medicine ..................................................................17
Chemistry .................................................................17
Physics ....................................................................19
Universities and Research Centers .......................................20
Concluding Remark .......................................................21
Sources: .....................................................................22
[Preface]
The impact of Islamic civilization on the European civilization is undeniable. Muslims’ philosophical, theological and scientific thoughts that were introduced to the Medieval West had a remarkable impact on different aspects of European life. Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd and Ghazali’s works left a tremendous influence on Western Medieval philosophy and theology.Mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy and medicine are other areas of influence. Some Western scholars in the Middle Age studied Arabic, and translated Islamic sciences into Latin. Through trade and crusade wars too some aspects of Islamic culture were transmitted to the West.
The entire article can be accessed at:
https://www.academia.edu/37655842/The_I ... view-paper
Mohammad Fanaei Eshkevari
(published in Horizons of Thought Vol.1, 2014)
Table of Contents
[Preface] ......................................................................3
Science and Civilization in Islam ...........................................4
Ways of Influence ............................................................5
1. European Intermingle with Muslims ....................................5
[2. Crusades] ................................................................6
3. Trade .....................................................................7
4. Translation ...............................................................8
Some Areas of Impact .......................................................9
Philosophy ..................................................................9
Ibn Sina.................................................................10
Ghazali .................................................................11
Ibn Rushd ..............................................................12
Mathematics ..............................................................14
Astronomy ................................................................15
Medicine ..................................................................17
Chemistry .................................................................17
Physics ....................................................................19
Universities and Research Centers .......................................20
Concluding Remark .......................................................21
Sources: .....................................................................22
[Preface]
The impact of Islamic civilization on the European civilization is undeniable. Muslims’ philosophical, theological and scientific thoughts that were introduced to the Medieval West had a remarkable impact on different aspects of European life. Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd and Ghazali’s works left a tremendous influence on Western Medieval philosophy and theology.Mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy and medicine are other areas of influence. Some Western scholars in the Middle Age studied Arabic, and translated Islamic sciences into Latin. Through trade and crusade wars too some aspects of Islamic culture were transmitted to the West.
The entire article can be accessed at:
https://www.academia.edu/37655842/The_I ... view-paper
What It Means To Be A Muslim | Abdullah II King of Jordan Speech at European Union Parliament
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKs-z56ZrHY
King Abdullah II of Jordan delivered a historic speech at the European Union Parliament. He realized the World that Muslims doesn't mean terrorism, in fact, even in the Muslim greeting, they say 'Peace be with you'. A true Muslim can't imagine harming his neighbor. He was given standing ovation by the Members of EU.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKs-z56ZrHY
King Abdullah II of Jordan delivered a historic speech at the European Union Parliament. He realized the World that Muslims doesn't mean terrorism, in fact, even in the Muslim greeting, they say 'Peace be with you'. A true Muslim can't imagine harming his neighbor. He was given standing ovation by the Members of EU.
Malise Ruthven Islam A Very Short Introduction 1998
Book: Malise Ruthven Islam A Very Short Introduction 1998
Preface:
To write a 'Very Short Introduction' to the religion of approximately one-fifth of the human family has been a daunting assignment. Brevity depends on selection, and selection on exclusion. Given the vast range of human societies contained under the label 'Islamic', any process of selection or exclusion must also entail distortion. In choosing to focus on certain topics at the expense of others, I am conscious of following my own instincts and prejudices. Professionally I am a journalist turned academic, and I have drawn on both disciplines in the book. The journalist in me has an eye on newspaper headlines. Aware that 'Islam' is seen by many as a hostile force, a possible replacement for communism as the main ideological challenge to post-Enlightenment liberalism, I have given more space to Islamic politics than some would say the subject warrants. The same might be said of my chapter on women and the family, a controversial subject that looms large in news coverage of the Islamic world. At the same time, the academic in me has tried to eschew the stereotypes or facile generalizations that usually accompany the treatment of these controversial topics in the media.
The entire book can be downloaded at: https://www.academia.edu/7210864/Malise ... view-paper
Preface:
To write a 'Very Short Introduction' to the religion of approximately one-fifth of the human family has been a daunting assignment. Brevity depends on selection, and selection on exclusion. Given the vast range of human societies contained under the label 'Islamic', any process of selection or exclusion must also entail distortion. In choosing to focus on certain topics at the expense of others, I am conscious of following my own instincts and prejudices. Professionally I am a journalist turned academic, and I have drawn on both disciplines in the book. The journalist in me has an eye on newspaper headlines. Aware that 'Islam' is seen by many as a hostile force, a possible replacement for communism as the main ideological challenge to post-Enlightenment liberalism, I have given more space to Islamic politics than some would say the subject warrants. The same might be said of my chapter on women and the family, a controversial subject that looms large in news coverage of the Islamic world. At the same time, the academic in me has tried to eschew the stereotypes or facile generalizations that usually accompany the treatment of these controversial topics in the media.
The entire book can be downloaded at: https://www.academia.edu/7210864/Malise ... view-paper
Creeping Shariah Has Nothing on the Woke Mob
In his speech at the Republican convention in 2016, Donald Trump spoke of the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, where a man with jihadist sympathies murdered 49 people. “As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our L.G.B.T.Q. citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology,” he said.
At the time, this sort of rhetoric was common among Trump and his allies, who fashioned themselves in the mold of European right-wing populists, demonizing Muslims as a threat to hard-won Western sexual freedoms. Perhaps the hottest ticket at that year’s Republican National Convention was an L.G.B.T.Q. party called Wake Up! where the Dutch politician Geert Wilders warned about Shariah law in front of a photo exhibition featuring skinny, shirtless boys in MAGA hats, called “Twinks for Trump.” The photographer behind that exhibition, a reactionary libertine named Lucian Wintrich, briefly served as the White House correspondent for the far-right website The Gateway Pundit.
Seven years later, as the battle against wokeness has supplanted the war on terror in the right-wing imagination, conservative sympathies are reversing. “Republicans are wooing Muslim voters by promising to protect them from L.G.B.T.Q. rights advocates whose demands conflict with their faith,” David Weigel reported in Semafor this week. The Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who once called for banning Muslim immigration from the Middle East, recently ran a sympathetic segment about Muslim parents in Maryland who want their kids to be exempt from reading books with L.G.B.T.Q. characters or themes. “Us Catholics and other Christians, other people of faith, have been waiting for the Muslims to step up on this issue,” Ingraham told her guest, a Muslim father and activist named Kareem Monib.
On Wednesday, a Gateway Pundit article celebrated the all-Muslim City Council in Hamtramck, Mich., which voted to ban all but five flags from flying on city property — a move widely seen as targeting Pride flags. “The revolt against the radical L.G.B.T.Q.I.+ takeover of the U.S. won another battle this week,” the article crowed.
This nascent alliance between conservative Christians and Muslims marks the resurrection of a right-wing project that was derailed, for a time, by the Sept. 11 attacks. Back in the 1990s, American conservatives founded a group called the World Congress of Families in an effort to unite pious traditionalists from across the globe against the forces of secular modernity. Before the attacks on the World Trade Center, they’d been planning simultaneous conferences in Mexico City and Dubai. After the attacks, those plans fell apart and cooperation between right-leaning Christians and Muslims became more fraught, though it continued in international bodies like the United Nations.
In the United States, some conservative Christians held on to the possibility of an alliance with conservative forces in Islam. The influential activist Grover Norquist has been doing Muslim outreach for decades. Before he was a major stolen-election conspiracy theorist, the right-wing propagandist Dinesh D’Souza expressed his preference for Islamic radicalism over Western liberalism in his book “The Enemy at Home.”
But at a time when abhorrence of Islam was an organizing principle of the Republican right, such reactionary ecumenism was unpopular. Some of Norquist’s fellow conservatives even smeared him, absurdly, as a Muslim Brotherhood mole, and nearly got him removed from the board of the National Rifle Association.
Now, however, the backlash against what’s sometimes called gender ideology is so strong that it’s creating space for strange new political bedfellows. Consider, for example, the political journey of the writer Asra Nomani.
A former foreign correspondent, Nomani had been close to Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter murdered by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002. After his killing, she became prominent as a Muslim critic of Islamic fundamentalism. In 2004, The New York Times wrote about her “Rosa Parks-style civil disobedience” in refusing to leave the men’s section of a mosque. She co-wrote a Washington Post column denouncing the hijab as the product of an ideology that “absolves men of sexually harassing women and puts the onus on the victim to protect herself by covering up.” When Nomani, a self-described liberal Democrat, voted for Trump in 2016, she described it, in part, as a vote against Islamic extremism.
So I was a little surprised when I saw that Nomani, who lives in Virginia, had joined a protest last week organized by the Muslim parents Ingraham lauded. In 2015, Nomani treated Muslim demands for a school holiday on Eid al-Adha as an example of “creeping Shariah.” Now she was aligning with parents who insisted that their kids be allowed to opt out of school assignments that went against their religious values. But what seemed like an obvious contradiction to me made perfect sense to her: Once again, she saw herself struggling against a malign and totalizing ideology. Wokeism, she told me, “is more of a danger to all of our societies than Islamism. Especially when it comes to the kids.” Islamism, she said, “is not seeping into our K-12 system. But wokeism is.”
Nomani described “bonfire potlucks” in Virginia where “Muslim parents are starting to speak with religious Christian conservative parents.” Were it not inspired by an anti-L.G.B.T.Q. backlash, such interfaith dialogue would be touching. History shows us, however, that nothing drives conservatives to reach out to groups they once feared as much as another group that they fear even more.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/16/opin ... 778d3e6de3
At the time, this sort of rhetoric was common among Trump and his allies, who fashioned themselves in the mold of European right-wing populists, demonizing Muslims as a threat to hard-won Western sexual freedoms. Perhaps the hottest ticket at that year’s Republican National Convention was an L.G.B.T.Q. party called Wake Up! where the Dutch politician Geert Wilders warned about Shariah law in front of a photo exhibition featuring skinny, shirtless boys in MAGA hats, called “Twinks for Trump.” The photographer behind that exhibition, a reactionary libertine named Lucian Wintrich, briefly served as the White House correspondent for the far-right website The Gateway Pundit.
Seven years later, as the battle against wokeness has supplanted the war on terror in the right-wing imagination, conservative sympathies are reversing. “Republicans are wooing Muslim voters by promising to protect them from L.G.B.T.Q. rights advocates whose demands conflict with their faith,” David Weigel reported in Semafor this week. The Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who once called for banning Muslim immigration from the Middle East, recently ran a sympathetic segment about Muslim parents in Maryland who want their kids to be exempt from reading books with L.G.B.T.Q. characters or themes. “Us Catholics and other Christians, other people of faith, have been waiting for the Muslims to step up on this issue,” Ingraham told her guest, a Muslim father and activist named Kareem Monib.
On Wednesday, a Gateway Pundit article celebrated the all-Muslim City Council in Hamtramck, Mich., which voted to ban all but five flags from flying on city property — a move widely seen as targeting Pride flags. “The revolt against the radical L.G.B.T.Q.I.+ takeover of the U.S. won another battle this week,” the article crowed.
This nascent alliance between conservative Christians and Muslims marks the resurrection of a right-wing project that was derailed, for a time, by the Sept. 11 attacks. Back in the 1990s, American conservatives founded a group called the World Congress of Families in an effort to unite pious traditionalists from across the globe against the forces of secular modernity. Before the attacks on the World Trade Center, they’d been planning simultaneous conferences in Mexico City and Dubai. After the attacks, those plans fell apart and cooperation between right-leaning Christians and Muslims became more fraught, though it continued in international bodies like the United Nations.
In the United States, some conservative Christians held on to the possibility of an alliance with conservative forces in Islam. The influential activist Grover Norquist has been doing Muslim outreach for decades. Before he was a major stolen-election conspiracy theorist, the right-wing propagandist Dinesh D’Souza expressed his preference for Islamic radicalism over Western liberalism in his book “The Enemy at Home.”
But at a time when abhorrence of Islam was an organizing principle of the Republican right, such reactionary ecumenism was unpopular. Some of Norquist’s fellow conservatives even smeared him, absurdly, as a Muslim Brotherhood mole, and nearly got him removed from the board of the National Rifle Association.
Now, however, the backlash against what’s sometimes called gender ideology is so strong that it’s creating space for strange new political bedfellows. Consider, for example, the political journey of the writer Asra Nomani.
A former foreign correspondent, Nomani had been close to Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter murdered by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002. After his killing, she became prominent as a Muslim critic of Islamic fundamentalism. In 2004, The New York Times wrote about her “Rosa Parks-style civil disobedience” in refusing to leave the men’s section of a mosque. She co-wrote a Washington Post column denouncing the hijab as the product of an ideology that “absolves men of sexually harassing women and puts the onus on the victim to protect herself by covering up.” When Nomani, a self-described liberal Democrat, voted for Trump in 2016, she described it, in part, as a vote against Islamic extremism.
So I was a little surprised when I saw that Nomani, who lives in Virginia, had joined a protest last week organized by the Muslim parents Ingraham lauded. In 2015, Nomani treated Muslim demands for a school holiday on Eid al-Adha as an example of “creeping Shariah.” Now she was aligning with parents who insisted that their kids be allowed to opt out of school assignments that went against their religious values. But what seemed like an obvious contradiction to me made perfect sense to her: Once again, she saw herself struggling against a malign and totalizing ideology. Wokeism, she told me, “is more of a danger to all of our societies than Islamism. Especially when it comes to the kids.” Islamism, she said, “is not seeping into our K-12 system. But wokeism is.”
Nomani described “bonfire potlucks” in Virginia where “Muslim parents are starting to speak with religious Christian conservative parents.” Were it not inspired by an anti-L.G.B.T.Q. backlash, such interfaith dialogue would be touching. History shows us, however, that nothing drives conservatives to reach out to groups they once feared as much as another group that they fear even more.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/16/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Perception of Islam
The Islamophobic Smear Campaign Dividing Democrats
On paper, President Biden’s nominee to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Adeel Abdullah Mangi, is an archetypical candidate for a federal judgeship. Mangi has a sterling legal education, which he followed with a distinguished career at a high-profile private firm mixing corporate litigation with important pro bono work. He also has a classic American story: He grew up in a poor country dreaming of a career as a lawyer and immigrated to the United States, where he ascended to the heights of his profession.
The candidate has another quality that was especially appealing to Biden, who has made diversifying the federal bench a key priority: Mangi would be the first Muslim American federal appellate judge in the United States.
When Mangi appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee in December for a hearing about this lifetime appointment, Republican senators did not ask him about his legal background or judicial philosophy. “Do you condemn the atrocities of Hamas terrorists?” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas demanded of Mangi, a Pakistani American with no connection to Hamas or Palestinians other than the fact that he is Muslim, along with 1.8 billion other people across the globe.
Such bad faith ambushes are Cruz’s stock in trade, especially since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas. So it was hardly a surprise that he and his Republican colleagues spent their allotted time insinuating that Mangi was an antisemite and an apologist not just for Hamas but also for the perpetrators of Sept. 11.
But what is much more worrying is that these tactics could work on some Senate Democrats. Right-wing judicial activists have been running a smear campaign against Mangi, including advertisements aimed at Senate Democrats like Jon Tester of Montana and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, who are battling for re-election. The campaigns describe Mangi, with no evidence, as an antisemite and attempt to link him to Hamas and other terrorist groups. This means that Democrats who run the risk of losing their seats come November may see defending Mangi’s nomination as a potential risk to their chances at re-election. The campaign seems to be working. Over the past few days, CNN and HuffPost have reported that there may not be enough Democratic votes to confirm Mangi.
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This is an outrage. The attacks on Mangi are utterly disingenuous. Major Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, have made statements of support for Mangi, whose pro bono legal work has focused in part on fighting for religious liberty and against religious bias across multiple faiths. The American Jewish Committee, which has joined several amicus briefs to the Supreme Court led by Mangi, described him as “a person of integrity, champion of pluralism and adversary of discrimination against any group.”
Abandoning Mangi’s nomination would be an unconscionable act at any time, but especially perilous for Democrats in the current political climate, when tens of thousands of Democratic primary voters in key states are expressing their outrage at Biden’s policy in Gaza by voting uncommitted. Meanwhile, the right is using the attacks on Oct. 7 and the ensuing war in Gaza as a means to imply that any Muslim could be pro-Hamas or antisemitic. If Democrats acquiesce, they will set a dangerous precedent.
Of course, the crucial background for the attacks on Mangi is the wave of Islamophobia that has swept the country over the past six months. The Council on American-Islamic Relations reported at the end of 2023 that it saw a 216 percent increase in reports of bias and requests for assistance from the previous year. A 6-year-old boy was stabbed to death in what investigators are calling a hate crime days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, and three college students of Palestinian origin were shot in Burlington, Vt., last Thanksgiving weekend, stunning that small, progressive city.
But this goes beyond Islamophobia, as heinous as it is, and beyond Israel and Gaza. The basic ideals of the Democratic Party, including the moral and legal obligation to provide asylum to those fleeing persecution, seem up for grabs. On immigration more broadly, the party has acquiesced to right-wing talking points, failing to prevent or even helping the firm shove of the Overton window to the right. For all the Democratic talk about a freedom agenda, the party has not really seized religious liberty, one of Mangi’s core areas of pro bono work, as part of its vision of a pluralistic and inclusive society.
“By allowing the far right to frame Mangi’s historic nomination with bogus Islamophobic smears and divide-and-conquer Senate Democrats, we aren’t just losing a nominee; we’re surrendering the entire debate on our core values of multiracial democracy and religious freedom,” Waleed Shahid, a veteran Democratic operative who has helped spearhead the uncommitted movement, told me.
While the Democrats waver, it is clear what kind of America the Republican Party wants. Republican values were on full display at Mangi’s confirmation hearing. Republican senators harangued Mangi for his tenuous links to a Rutgers Law School institute, accusing him of holding views espoused by speakers invited as panelists at the institute.
That institute, the Center for Security, Race and Rights, has indeed invited provocative speakers, in service of fostering dialogue on complex and sometimes difficult subjects. Even so, Mangi had no role in selecting such speakers or determining the programming at the institute. He repeatedly, with admirable patience, condemned terrorism and condemned any attempt to justify acts of terrorism.
In recent days, as his nomination seemed to be teetering, prominent Democrats spoke up in his defense.
“Adeel Mangi has faced a barrage of outrageous and unfounded smears because of his religious faith,” said Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, Mangi’s home state. “When we look at Mr. Mangi’s record — the totality of his professional life, his commitment to religious freedom and civil rights, his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee — it only reinforces his commitment to upholding and advancing the fundamental values we all hold as Americans.”
The Biden administration is speaking out to urge Mangi’s confirmation without delay, calling him “an extraordinarily qualified nominee who is devoted to the rule of law, lived the American dream through hard work, proven his integrity and would make history on the bench,” Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, told me, warning that “no senator should cave to hateful, undignified lies.”
If Senate Democrats backpedal in response to the right-wing smear campaign against Mangi, they squander a perfect opportunity to demonstrate the stark difference between their party and the G.O.P. at a time when some Democrats have become deeply disillusioned with their party’s ceding of ground to the right.
As the presidential election grinds on, it is clear that racism and Islamophobia lie at the core of the Republican Party’s revanchist campaign. Donald Trump, echoing fascist leaders throughout history, has declared that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and when offered the opportunity to walk back or soften this inflammatory phrase by Fox News’s Howard Kurtz recently, Trump instead doubled down. “Why do you use words like ‘vermin’ and ‘poisoning of the blood’?” Kurtz asked. “Because our country is being poisoned,” Trump replied.
What better retort is there to this vicious notion than the formidable accomplishments of Adeel Mangi? He is an exemplar of how immigration has made the United States a stronger, richer, more powerful nation. He was drawn to the United States and the law by watching “Matlock” as a child in Karachi, Pakistan. In his pro bono legal work he represents another venerable American tradition: a devotion to protecting the freedom of all Americans to peacefully practice their faiths without interference, prejudice or coercion from the state, a notion the right has sought to upend.
I would ask any Democrat considering voting against this nominee this question: What vision of America do you actually believe in, if not the one exemplified by the life and work of a man like Adeel Mangi? Republicans have been very clear about who they are and what kind of future they imagine for our country. Confirming this nominee without delay would offer a powerful and necessary contrast to that dark vision and an opportunity for Democrats to tell us which America they stand for.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/19/opin ... 778d3e6de3
On paper, President Biden’s nominee to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Adeel Abdullah Mangi, is an archetypical candidate for a federal judgeship. Mangi has a sterling legal education, which he followed with a distinguished career at a high-profile private firm mixing corporate litigation with important pro bono work. He also has a classic American story: He grew up in a poor country dreaming of a career as a lawyer and immigrated to the United States, where he ascended to the heights of his profession.
The candidate has another quality that was especially appealing to Biden, who has made diversifying the federal bench a key priority: Mangi would be the first Muslim American federal appellate judge in the United States.
When Mangi appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee in December for a hearing about this lifetime appointment, Republican senators did not ask him about his legal background or judicial philosophy. “Do you condemn the atrocities of Hamas terrorists?” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas demanded of Mangi, a Pakistani American with no connection to Hamas or Palestinians other than the fact that he is Muslim, along with 1.8 billion other people across the globe.
Such bad faith ambushes are Cruz’s stock in trade, especially since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas. So it was hardly a surprise that he and his Republican colleagues spent their allotted time insinuating that Mangi was an antisemite and an apologist not just for Hamas but also for the perpetrators of Sept. 11.
But what is much more worrying is that these tactics could work on some Senate Democrats. Right-wing judicial activists have been running a smear campaign against Mangi, including advertisements aimed at Senate Democrats like Jon Tester of Montana and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, who are battling for re-election. The campaigns describe Mangi, with no evidence, as an antisemite and attempt to link him to Hamas and other terrorist groups. This means that Democrats who run the risk of losing their seats come November may see defending Mangi’s nomination as a potential risk to their chances at re-election. The campaign seems to be working. Over the past few days, CNN and HuffPost have reported that there may not be enough Democratic votes to confirm Mangi.
Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
This is an outrage. The attacks on Mangi are utterly disingenuous. Major Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, have made statements of support for Mangi, whose pro bono legal work has focused in part on fighting for religious liberty and against religious bias across multiple faiths. The American Jewish Committee, which has joined several amicus briefs to the Supreme Court led by Mangi, described him as “a person of integrity, champion of pluralism and adversary of discrimination against any group.”
Abandoning Mangi’s nomination would be an unconscionable act at any time, but especially perilous for Democrats in the current political climate, when tens of thousands of Democratic primary voters in key states are expressing their outrage at Biden’s policy in Gaza by voting uncommitted. Meanwhile, the right is using the attacks on Oct. 7 and the ensuing war in Gaza as a means to imply that any Muslim could be pro-Hamas or antisemitic. If Democrats acquiesce, they will set a dangerous precedent.
Of course, the crucial background for the attacks on Mangi is the wave of Islamophobia that has swept the country over the past six months. The Council on American-Islamic Relations reported at the end of 2023 that it saw a 216 percent increase in reports of bias and requests for assistance from the previous year. A 6-year-old boy was stabbed to death in what investigators are calling a hate crime days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, and three college students of Palestinian origin were shot in Burlington, Vt., last Thanksgiving weekend, stunning that small, progressive city.
But this goes beyond Islamophobia, as heinous as it is, and beyond Israel and Gaza. The basic ideals of the Democratic Party, including the moral and legal obligation to provide asylum to those fleeing persecution, seem up for grabs. On immigration more broadly, the party has acquiesced to right-wing talking points, failing to prevent or even helping the firm shove of the Overton window to the right. For all the Democratic talk about a freedom agenda, the party has not really seized religious liberty, one of Mangi’s core areas of pro bono work, as part of its vision of a pluralistic and inclusive society.
“By allowing the far right to frame Mangi’s historic nomination with bogus Islamophobic smears and divide-and-conquer Senate Democrats, we aren’t just losing a nominee; we’re surrendering the entire debate on our core values of multiracial democracy and religious freedom,” Waleed Shahid, a veteran Democratic operative who has helped spearhead the uncommitted movement, told me.
While the Democrats waver, it is clear what kind of America the Republican Party wants. Republican values were on full display at Mangi’s confirmation hearing. Republican senators harangued Mangi for his tenuous links to a Rutgers Law School institute, accusing him of holding views espoused by speakers invited as panelists at the institute.
That institute, the Center for Security, Race and Rights, has indeed invited provocative speakers, in service of fostering dialogue on complex and sometimes difficult subjects. Even so, Mangi had no role in selecting such speakers or determining the programming at the institute. He repeatedly, with admirable patience, condemned terrorism and condemned any attempt to justify acts of terrorism.
In recent days, as his nomination seemed to be teetering, prominent Democrats spoke up in his defense.
“Adeel Mangi has faced a barrage of outrageous and unfounded smears because of his religious faith,” said Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, Mangi’s home state. “When we look at Mr. Mangi’s record — the totality of his professional life, his commitment to religious freedom and civil rights, his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee — it only reinforces his commitment to upholding and advancing the fundamental values we all hold as Americans.”
The Biden administration is speaking out to urge Mangi’s confirmation without delay, calling him “an extraordinarily qualified nominee who is devoted to the rule of law, lived the American dream through hard work, proven his integrity and would make history on the bench,” Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, told me, warning that “no senator should cave to hateful, undignified lies.”
If Senate Democrats backpedal in response to the right-wing smear campaign against Mangi, they squander a perfect opportunity to demonstrate the stark difference between their party and the G.O.P. at a time when some Democrats have become deeply disillusioned with their party’s ceding of ground to the right.
As the presidential election grinds on, it is clear that racism and Islamophobia lie at the core of the Republican Party’s revanchist campaign. Donald Trump, echoing fascist leaders throughout history, has declared that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and when offered the opportunity to walk back or soften this inflammatory phrase by Fox News’s Howard Kurtz recently, Trump instead doubled down. “Why do you use words like ‘vermin’ and ‘poisoning of the blood’?” Kurtz asked. “Because our country is being poisoned,” Trump replied.
What better retort is there to this vicious notion than the formidable accomplishments of Adeel Mangi? He is an exemplar of how immigration has made the United States a stronger, richer, more powerful nation. He was drawn to the United States and the law by watching “Matlock” as a child in Karachi, Pakistan. In his pro bono legal work he represents another venerable American tradition: a devotion to protecting the freedom of all Americans to peacefully practice their faiths without interference, prejudice or coercion from the state, a notion the right has sought to upend.
I would ask any Democrat considering voting against this nominee this question: What vision of America do you actually believe in, if not the one exemplified by the life and work of a man like Adeel Mangi? Republicans have been very clear about who they are and what kind of future they imagine for our country. Confirming this nominee without delay would offer a powerful and necessary contrast to that dark vision and an opportunity for Democrats to tell us which America they stand for.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/19/opin ... 778d3e6de3